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(Because blogging and obsessively searching Amazon is *almost* the same as working, right?)

Here's a totally gush-tastic review from teensreadtoo.com on the new Bloomsbury collection, FIRST KISS (THEN TELL):

Author Cylin Busby has brought together some of young adult's funniest and most talented authors to reminisce about their real-life first kisses (or the second, or the third, or the twenty-fifth). In a collection that ranges from funny to bittersweet, from cringe-worthy to downright disgusting, this is one anthology that is guaranteed to have you laughing out loud.

A slimy first kiss that wasn't even wanted, the breathless anticipation of a first kiss that never came, and the first kiss horror stories that should exist nowhere but in nightmares -- the authors hold nothing back when it comes to their memories (that is, when they can actually remember).

The book is also interspersed with quizzes about kissing, lists including historical kisses in movies, funny (but sometimes not-so-helpful) first kiss advice, and much more. It's a quick, easy read that's sure to appeal to both girls and boys, young and old. And since a portion of the proceeds from sales of the book benefit NPR's Youth Radio, you'll be doing both yourself and other teens a favor by picking up a copy of FIRST KISS (THEN TELL).

Aw, thanks Jen!
Obvs I can only take credit for my teensy, tiny part of the compendium, but still--flattery will get you everywhere.

One of the books I read during my research for the Martha Books was Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland in A.D. 1803. The time period was just about right; Little House in the Highlands is set in 1795, and change came slowly to those remote glens.

Dorothy traveled with her brother, William, and their friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Ooh! Now there's an idea for a novel!) In her journal she wrote,

"It was harvest-time, and the fields were quietly (might I be allowed to say pensively?) enlivened by small companies of reapers. It is not uncommon in the more lonely parts of the Highlands to see a single person so employed. The following poem was suggested to Wm. by a beautiful sentence in Thomas Wilkinson's Tour in Scotland."

And then she copied out William's poem (written two years later), "The Solitary Reaper."

A note in my Wm. Wordsworth collection tells me that the line from Thomas Wilkinson is this:

"Passed a female who was reaping alone; she sung in Erse, as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more."

I love to know the story behind a poem, a novel, a painting. Here is William's poem, all the lovelier to me for knowing what sparked it in his mind.

The Solitary Reaper
by William Wordsworth

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so shrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;—
I listen'd, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

This week's Poetry Friday round-up can be found at Hip Writer Mama.

What's Poetry Friday? Susan Thomsen explains at PoetryFoundation.org.

Well. Crap. I tried to set this up to post yesterday, and it so didn't. I can't find it on anyone's friends lists, etc. Grr. So here's a replay, if you've seen it, or a little something new if you haven't.

For this week's post, a sonnet by Wordsworth. In the past, I've posted part of his Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood and It is a Beauteous Evening.

Scorn Not the Sonnet
by William Wordsworth

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakspeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camöens soothed an exile's grief;
The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp,
It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faeryland
To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains--alas, too few!

In these 14 lines, which he claimed were "composed, almost extempore, in a short walk on the western side of Rydal Lake," Wordsworth has provided a brief bibliography of the masters of the sonnet, beginning with Shakesepare, moving throughout Europe, and ending with John Milton.

Francesco Petrarch was a Renaissance man -- literally. He's known as the father of humanism, in addition to being a scholar and poet. He fell in love with a woman named Laura from afar (while in church, no less), and wrote 366 poems about her, eventually collected by others and called Il Canzoniere. He used a form of the sonnet inherited from Giacamo da Lentini, which became known as the Petrarchan or Italianate sonnet. (Poor Lentini.) I covered the different types of sonnets in an earlier post.

Torquato Tasso was a 16th-century Italian poet most famous for his epic work, Gerusalemme Liberata, an epic poem about the battle between Christians and Muslims for Jerusalem in the First Crusades. He was welcomed by many royal patrons, but suffered from mental illness that prevented his enjoying it. Based on modern psychology, it would seem he was schizophrenic.

Luís de Camões, usually rendered in English as Camöens, was Portugal's greatest poet. Born in the 16th century, he wrote an epic poem called Os Lusídas about the glory of Portugal, along with a significant amount of lyrical poetry, including a great number of sonnets, ranging from a paraphrased version of the book of Job to poems about ideas (akin to what Wordsworth excelled at).

Dante Alighieri's life spanned the transition between the 13th and 14th centuries. His masterwork, La Commedia ("The Divine Comedy"), continues to be a source of inspiration for artists, authors and poets, even seven centuries later. The Commedia was broken into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, and features in part his beloved Beatrice, who was immortalised in another work, La Vita Nuova, from which I quoted in a post after my grandmother's death. (My guess is that the name Beatrice was chosen by Daniel Handler to be Lemony Snicket's unrequited love based on Dante's writings.)

Edmund Spenser was Poet Laureate of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. His most famous work is The Faerie Queene, which was essentially a huge sycophantic poem for the Queen and her Tudor ancestry. He was venerated by Wordsworth, Byron and others alive at the turn of the 19th century. For those fans of the 1995 movie version of Sense & Sensibility, the lines which Colonel Brandon reads to Marianne near the end are from The Faerie Queen.

John Milton was a 17th-century poet known for his epic poems written in blank verse*, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Milton was opposed to the monarchy, and supported the republican ideas of Thomas Cromwell, which went swimmingly for him until the Restoration, when he was forced to go into hiding. He emerged after a general pardon was issued, only to be arrested. He was eventually released, and died a free man. During the course of his life, Milton went blind, probaby from glaucoma; as a result, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were all dictated to others. Although they are frequently construed as religious works, Milton was writing about the revolution and restoration; his religious beliefs were outside the bounds of Christianity. In addition to his work in blank verse, Milton wrote a number of excellent sonnets, which were revered by Wordsworth and others.

*blank verse is the term for unrhymed iambic pentameter, used by Milton in his masterworks, by Shakespeare in his plays, and by many others as well. It remained quite popular as a means of composing verse until at least the late 19th century.

Poetry may be too strong a term. But today we do have at least two videos that can be called poetic. The third is a book video and four and five are.... well, you'll see.

Now I don't know how many of you listen to Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! the NPR News Quiz with regularity. If you do, you may recognize what I'm about to show you. Recently there was a Bluff the Listener Challenge where a real news story was read alongside two fake ones. The player must guess the correct news story. In this particular case they failed because the real story was the video you are about to see. It was about getting kids excited about poetry. Observe.



The funny thing? Wordsworth adapts really nicely. Don't know if I can countenance daffodils spelling out the words, "Check It" though.

This next one carries hints of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's still nice, though.



Thanks to Bookninja. Then we have our requisite children's book trailer. Simple. To the point. I'm not sure why more authors aren't doing this. Seems like cheapo advertising to me.



Thanks to Heather for that one.

Okay. Now we get goofy. When I was a child the television show Animaniacs presented this segment. Little did I know at the time that it was a bizarre homage to an infamous series of Orson Welles rants done while recording voice overs. Animaniacs gives the words to Maurice LaMarche and the result is here.



Don't get it? Watch the same clip but with the original Orson Welles rant. Gold, lovelies. Gold. There's a reason I didn't understand this as a child.



A very big thank you to Dan for discovering these. I am not, however, going to post the William Shatner and Casey Kasem ones.

William Wordsworth was a linchpin in the development of modern poetry. Prior to Wordsworth, poets cast about to find a subject. With Wordsworth, in many ways, the subject was always himself. In fact, even during Wordsworth's life, Hazlitt observed that Wordsworth was "his own subject," which was, at the time, an original concept. Wordsworth's poems focused on emotion, ideas and sentiment as much as they did on the natural world, often with some interconnectedness. Even today, Wordsworth's poems tap into the subconcious (or even unconcious) minds of his readers and teach them how to feel, and how to connect with their true, spiritual self.

When I was in high school, one of the poems that had the greatest effect on me was William Wordsworth's Ode "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Although the entire poem is fairly long -- eleven stanzas of varying length -- it is worth taking the time to read it in its entirety. First, to read its full content. Second, to bathe in the glorious language of the poem. If you have the time and inclination, I hope you'll follow the above link, and then come back to "talk" about the Ode with me.

The Ode leads off with an epigraph:

The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
&emsp Paulo majora canamus

The first three lines of the epigraph are the last three lines from another Wordsworth poem, "The Rainbow." The complete text of the poem is as follows:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
& emsp Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

The last line of the epigraph is a Latin quote from Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, and means "let us sing of greater things". Taken together, I believe that Wordsworth took his earlier nature poem about rejoicing in nature, and started thinking more carefully about the two ideas raised in the poem -- rejoicing in nature, and the idea that childhood influences later adulthood. Certainly those are topics explored in "Intimations of Immortality".

The Ode is essentially in three parts. Stanzas I through IV, which were written at least two years before the remainder of the poem, convey the poet's wistful sense that something has been lost. Stanzas V through VIII speak of resistence to the idea of growth or aging. Stanzas IX through XI reflect the acceptance of what remains, that there is still beauty in the world, and "strength in what remains behind": sympathy, empathy, faith and philosophy. Throughout the entire poem, the speaker's emotion is at odds with the joyous, bounteous world around him -- a departure from established traditions. At the same time, this poem can be read as a nature poem -- how children are very connected to nature and the world around them, but adults have dissociated themselves from the natural world, and can no longer feel their correct place in the natural world.

I want to focus in particular on three stanzas from the middle of the Ode, which are the ones that sang loudest to me when I first studied this poem in high school. I should note that these particular stanzas have been interpreted as believing in reincarnation, or at least in the pre-existence of the human soul. Wordsworth issued a denial that the Ode argues for preexistence of the soul, at the same time noting that there is nothing in Christian doctrine to preclude or contradict such a thing. They are stanzas V through VII:

V
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
&emsp Hath had elsewhere its setting,
&emsp &emsp And cometh from afar:
&emsp Not in entire forgetfulness,
&emsp And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
&emsp From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
&emsp Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
&emsp He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
&emsp Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
&emsp &emsp And by the vision splendid
&emsp &emsp Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

VI
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind;
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
&emsp And no unworthy aim,
&emsp The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
&emsp Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

VII
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' Darling of pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art;
&emsp A wedding or a festival,
&emsp A mourning or a funeral;
&emsp &emsp And this hath now his heart,
&emsp And unto this he frames his song:
&emsp &emsp Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
&emsp But it will not be long
&emsp Ere this be thrown aside,
&emsp And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
&emsp As if his whole vocation
&emsp Were endless imitation.

I hope you enjoyed the reference to Shakespeare's As You Like It in the seventh stanza, to the little Actor playing parts on a humorous stage. It's a reference the soliloquy which begins "All the world's a stage", and discusses the roles played by a man throughout his life, from infancy to old age, a "second childishness."

I confess that even now, more than 25 years after I first learned this poem, I still love the idea of little souls streaming to earth, trailing clouds of glory, to be housed in new little people. And I thought of it often when my children were infants, looking into their newborn eyes and seeing in those eyes all the secrets of the universe, or so it seemed. But perhaps I was simply sleep-deprived; who can tell?

In this middle part of the Ode, Wordsworth traces the aging process, and how the soul gets shoved aside gradually by the daily concerns and obligations of life, causing man to lose connectedness with nature and the divine. At least, that's my reading of it. The middle four stanzas deal almost exclusively with the aging process and its effect on the soul. Stanza number 9, the longest stanza of the Ode by far, represents the "turn" in this work, where Wordsworth takes all the "facts" he's presented, and begins to make his "argument", that even with things fallen away, he can raise songs of thanks and praise knowing that somewhere in him is a soul that remains connected to the source from whence it came. Stanzas 10 and 11 return to nature and to appreciation for nature,

One more quote from the poem, the tenth stanza of which includes these lines:

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
&emsp Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
&emsp We will grieve not, rather find
&emsp Strength in what remains behind;
&emsp In the primal sympathy
&emsp Which having been must ever be;
&emsp In the soothing thoughts that spring
&emsp Out of human suffering;
&emsp In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

Yes, movie-lovers, this portion of the poem is quoted in the movie, Splendor in the Grass, starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty. It is also, in many respects, the key point Wordsworth makes in the entire Ode.

According to many sources (including Harold Bloom), this poem is one of the most important poems in the English language. At the very least it was tremendously influential over a host of other poets, from Wordsworth's contemporaries like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and George Gordon, Lord Byron to later poets, including W.B. Yeats, and including most American poets from Ralph Waldo Emerson through Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens.

For today, and taking a line from Stanza 10 out of context,I hope that you will "Feel the gladness of the May!"