Poetry

When I was young, we got the book The Golden Treasury of Poetry, illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund.  I especially liked some of the long story poems, like Longfellow's "The Skeleton in Armor" and Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle."

When my brother was a schoolboy he entered a poetry contest and lost to a kid who plagiarized Tennyson's "The Eagle"!

I think my favourite poet is Robert Frost.  He'd tell these stories about country life in New England and somehow draw universal themes from them. (I have a few of his poems down by heart.) My book club will be reading his poems this autumn.  That's the right time of year for Frost!

Recently I've taken up translating some American poems into Scots dialect.  I guess it's to be closer to my Cape Breton Scottish mother since her death.  Free-form blank verse like Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg works best since you don't have to worry about stuff like rhyming so much.

I'd like to write poetry someday. (Please don't laugh.) It's story poems that I want to write, even though they've gone out of fashion in recent years.  I'm thinking of writing a poem about Cinderella, and eventually one about the ancient kings Cyrus and Croesus.