Poem for the Day - Marble Tornedo

Marble Tornedo

My girlfriend Heather experienced a
weather adventure. The havoc she caused
upset the boys squatting at marbles.
She had several hundred of her own, shoulder-
slung in a string bag, betting everyone.
As the storm bullied clouds off Barrenjoey,
she joined their game with forty of their
Tom Bowlers, Cat’s-eyes and Peewees in the rink.
At the line, the wind lifted her skirt, her plaits
like marionette strings. The Big Bonker she fired
carried itself nicely to a suitable distance
inside the circle, shooting glass for miles.
Strangely, though she collected all their marbles,
she wasn’t injured by their hailstones,
and remained intact.

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Graphic for the Day: I'm Such a Feminist!

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John Ashbery on PBS News

John Ashbery on PBS News

A Perfect Hat

I forget what it is I would rather be doing.
Floral and verbal, I am in the thick
of what I would rather be doing, jumping off a cliff,
rousing subordinates. There are just so many things
one would rather be caught out doing, like measuring the tree,
the swift shadow of which menaces us and bluebirds.
Oh the mill sang of many things but its wheel
was always rolling whether you noticed it or not.
The wheel that is still today but much larger.

It cautioned us to leave but we slept
the exact duration of the idea that never leaves us now.

And this is the perfect poem after teaching Personification on Saturday 11th September, so I thought I would post Ashbery's poem here. During class, we had a long discussion about 'pathetic fallacy' and the difference between this kind of trope and personification. I felt that if we were to worry about such terminology as 'pathetic fallacy' this might stifle our creativity while writing personification. Eventually, we reasoned, that we could attribute human feelings to a poem. Here Ashbery attributes "thinking" (or is it some kind of annoyance for the poet?) to the voice of the hat. Rainer Maria Rilke attributes the emotion of 'loss of freedom' in his poem, The Panther.

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