Two Offers…
Two offers, one (the first) perhaps richer than the other.
First offer: My wife, Buff Lindau, has recently published a book of poems, The House That Holds. I like it very much (and that is not a statement made because she is my wife). Her poems have two qualities that are perhaps in short supply these days. She is readable: We often forget how accessible, how present and significant, poetry was in a past time. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth century there were Browning societies and Burns societies all across America, in which ‘ordinary’ people met to read those two poets, Robert Browning and Robert Burns. Most of the American nineteenth century poets (not Whitman and Dickinson!) were known as ‘The Fireside Poets,’ because families gathered by the fireside and read their poems to each other: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell.
A second quality: She focuses on the events of every-day life. Most of my favorite poets do this. They remind us of the texture of life as it is lived.
So here is the offer: If you would like a copy of her book, send me five dollars (ah, snail mail!) and your address in an envelope to me, Huck Gutman, 34 Harrington Terrace, Burlington, VT 05401 , and I will send you a copy. You can either send a $5 bill or a check made out to me. It is a good deal: I will pay the ‘postage and handling.’ You can, if you are in the credit card mode, get a copy from Amazon for ten bucks, including postage if you have Prime. https://www.amazon.com/House-That-Holds-Poems/dp/1949066657/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=the+house+that+holds&qid=1624302909&sr=8-2 Not as good a deal, but you get to use a credit card. And it will probably arrive more quickly, since pack and ship is not in my fast lane. (Actually, I don’t think I have a fast lane.)
Second offer: I have a web page, beautifully designed, with links to all of my previous letters. Originally I sent those letters out, as many of you know, through a List-Serv at the University of Vermont. But these are strange times, and budgetary considerations limit a lot of things, so I figured I ought to be independent of UVM and thus I got myself a web site. I had it designed by a wonderful student, Miranda Parker, and now I mail out letters through that. If you go to the website you can see thumbnails which will link up to each of my previous emails. https://www.huckgutman.com/
Ah, but not everyone wants to go to websites and rummage around. So the second offer is, at the behest of my wife, a set of links that will connect you up – gratis of course – to letters about a pretty good array of poets.
A brief introduction to these letters, referring to Whitman and William Carlos Williams…
Eugenio Montale, “Perhaps One Morning”
William Wordsworth, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”
William Carlos Williams, “To a Poor Old Woman”
Robert Frost, “ The Oven Bird”
Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Tomatoes”
Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Waiting Room”
Robert Hayden, “Frederick Douglass”
Anne Carson, “Essay on What I Think About Most”
Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser”
Music and Transcendence: Beethoven, Mahler, Schonberg – and Rilke
Emily Dickinson, “As Imperceptibly as Grief”
Constantine Cavafy, “Comes to Rest”
William Wordsworth, “The world is too much with us”
A.E. Housman, “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff”
Zbigniew Herbert, “The Envoi of Mr. Cogito”
Charles Ives, “The Things Our Fathers Loved” [Music and poetry]
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool” and “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”
Seamus Heaney, “Singing School: 4. Summer 1969”
Charles Baudelaire, “A Rotting Corpse”
Vladimir Mayakovsky, “At the Top of My Voice”
Zbigniew Herbert: The Utility of Poems, “Mr Cogito Reads the Newspaper”
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ninth Duino Elegy”
Philip Larkin, Three Poems: “This Be the Verse,” “Mower,” and “Aubade”
On the Limits of the Imagination: What Henri Bergson has to teach us
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No Worst, there is none”
Guillaume Apollinaire “The Little Car”
A lighthearted interlude: Gioachino Rossini
Arthur Rimbaud, “The Sleeper in the Valley” and “At the Cabaret Vert”
Bertolt Brecht, “When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain”
Paul Celan, “Once” and also “The Trumpet-Part”
Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”
Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
Rainer Maria Rilke, “On Music”
Wallace Stevens, “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”
Paul Zimmer, “A Romance for the Wild Turkey”
William Carlos Williams, “Calypsos II,” a very short poem
Joachim Du Bellay and Charles Baudelaire, “Heureux qui” and “Le Voyage”
William Bolcom “Lime Jell-O Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise:” Music and fun: Short
Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning”
W. H. Auden, Two of the “China Sonnets”
John Keats, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” about which the commentator reverses himself
Jericho Brown, “Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry”
John Burnside, “Scotlandwell,” from “An Essay Concerning Light”
Adrienne Rich, from Twenty-One Love Poems (IV)