100 Day Project – Days 15 and 16

DAY 15 (May 25th, 2017)

Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire

The Carcass

Remember that object we saw, dear soul,
In the sweetness of a summer morn:
At a bend of the path a loathsome carrion
On a bed with pebbles strewn,

With legs raised like a lustful woman,
Burning and sweating poisons,
It spread open, nonchalant and scornful,
Its belly, ripe with exhalations.

The sun shone onto the rotting heap,
As if to bring it to the boil,
And tender a hundredfold to vast Nature
All that together she had joined;

And the sky watched that superb carcass
Like a flower blossom out.
The stench was so strong that on the grass
You thought you would pass out.

Flies hummed upon the putrid belly,
Whence larvae in black battalions spread
And like a heavy liquid flowed
Along the tatters deliquescing.

All together it unfurled, and rose like a wave
And bubbling it sprang forth;
One might have believed that, with a faint breath filled,
The body, multiplying, lived.

And this world gave out a strange music
Like of running water and of wind,
Or of grain in a winnow
Rhythmically shaken and tossed.

Form was erased and all but a vision,
A sketch slow to take shape
On a forgotten canvas, which the artist finishes
From memory alone.

Behind the rocks a fretting bitch
Looked at us with fierce mien
Anxious to retrieve from the corpse
A morsel that she had dropped.

Yet to this rot you shall be like,
To this horrid corruption,
Star of my eyes, sun of desire,
You, my angel and my passion!

Yes, such you shall be, you, queen of all graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you go beneath the grass and waxy flowers,
To mold among the skeletons.

Then, oh my beauty! You must tell the vermin,
As it eats you up with kisses,
That I have preserved the form and essence divine
Of my decayed loves.

My Commentary

It is not you upon which the maggot feeds,
but your bastard brother,
lame in the leg,
and black in the eye.

It is he who wastes away
under the damp earth.

He once laughed and lived,
and fancied himself out of God’s reach.

It matters not. He was never counted
one among the angels.
There you are, my friend, smiling.

DAY 16 (May 26th, 2017)

Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke

From the Book of Hours

I’m too alone in the world, yet not alone enough
to make each hour holy.
I’m too small in the world, yet not small enough
to be simply in your presence, like a thing—
just as it is.

I want to know my own will
and to move with it.
And I want, in the hushed moments
when the nameless draws near,
to be among the wise ones—
or alone.

My Commentary

The rain has given me time among the Ancients,
to gaze tenderly upon young and old alike.

To see without looking
To rise without standing

To hear the music coursing along
the taut tendons of this city.


The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project is a creativity excavation. It’s about unearthing dormant or unrealized creativity by committing to a daily practice everyday for 100 days.
Creativity is a skill. The more we practice, the more skilled we become. Practice takes time. Practice takes commitment. Practice is a radical act in this speeded up world. Through practice, we develop a creative habit. Through habit, we reconnect with and know ourselves again as a creative being.

I started this 100 Day Project on May 11th. My project is to read a poem, and write at least one first-draft stanza inspired by that poem. I’ll post the results at www.bradseverance.com/category/100-day-project/

Enjoy!

100 Day Project – Days 13 and 14

DAY 13 (May 23rd, 2017)

George Meredith
George Meredith

Dirge in Woods

A wind sways the pines,
     And below
Not a breath of wild air;
Still as the mosses that glow
On the flooring and over the lines
Of the roots here and there.
The pine-tree drops its dead;
They are quiet, as under the sea.
Overhead, overhead
Rushes life in a race,
As the clouds the clouds chase;
     And we go,
And we drop like the fruits of the tree,
     Even we,
     Even so.

My Commentary

In nature we find our tidings.
Find your lesson in the river’s tide.
The melting snows rush headlong for the sea,
past rock and fallen tree,
tumbling from the mountaintop.

You were once a word that fell like rain
from the lips of an Olympian god.

DAY 14 (May 24th, 2017)

George Meredith
George Meredith

Lucifer in Starlight

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o’er Afric’s sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.

My Commentary


The light from this copper-red moon—
This blood-drunk moon,
Penetrates your eyes—
Your terrible eyes,
And in them I see a rabid dog
Yellow at the tooth with violence and decay.


The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project is a creativity excavation. It’s about unearthing dormant or unrealized creativity by committing to a daily practice everyday for 100 days.
Creativity is a skill. The more we practice, the more skilled we become. Practice takes time. Practice takes commitment. Practice is a radical act in this speeded up world. Through practice, we develop a creative habit. Through habit, we reconnect with and know ourselves again as a creative being.

I started this 100 Day Project on May 11th. My project is to read a poem, and write at least one first-draft stanza inspired by that poem. I’ll post the results at www.bradseverance.com/category/100-day-project/

Enjoy!

100 Day Project – Days 11 and 12

DAY 11 (May 21st, 2017)

Edward Thomas
Edward Thomas

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

My Commentary

The rain will fall on all my earthly days
and when I lay down my mother’s bones
… and all those faces singly seen
bobbing on the wet city streets
will lay me down
and I will love them all
and we will part as friends.

DAY 12 (May 22nd, 2017)

Edward Thomas
Edward Thomas

Like The Touch Of Rain

Like the touch of rain she was
On a man’s flesh and hair and eyes
When the joy of walking thus
Has taken him by surprise:

With the love of the storm he burns,
He sings, he laughs, well I know how,
But forgets when he returns
As I shall not forget her ‘Go now’.

Those two words shut a door
Between me and the blessed rain
That was never shut before
And will not open again.

My Commentary

You mustn’t love the world too much
she is like a wayward lover
today her words are whispered honey
and tomorrow her kisses will sting your neck.


The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project is a creativity excavation. It’s about unearthing dormant or unrealized creativity by committing to a daily practice everyday for 100 days.
Creativity is a skill. The more we practice, the more skilled we become. Practice takes time. Practice takes commitment. Practice is a radical act in this speeded up world. Through practice, we develop a creative habit. Through habit, we reconnect with and know ourselves again as a creative being.

I started this 100 Day Project on May 11th. My project is to read a poem, and write at least one first-draft stanza inspired by that poem. I’ll post the results at www.bradseverance.com/category/100-day-project/

Enjoy!

100 Day Project – Days 9 and 10

DAY 9 (May 19th, 2017)

John Milton
John Milton

On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

My Commentary

His outstretched hand
groped in the dark
for a thing he could not see
but always knew

His peregrine eye pierced the clouds
and sky stranded with Tyrian purple …

and still he was blind.

DAY 10 (May 20th, 2017)

Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson

The Soul Selects Her Own Society

The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I’ve known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

My Commentary

Though gifts of gold and ivory
be arrayed before her, kneeling
she, unmoved by the courtship
of so many, iron heavy and unrefined,
her smile alights only on a
bright feather heavenward fallen


The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project is a creativity excavation. It’s about unearthing dormant or unrealized creativity by committing to a daily practice everyday for 100 days.
Creativity is a skill. The more we practice, the more skilled we become. Practice takes time. Practice takes commitment. Practice is a radical act in this speeded up world. Through practice, we develop a creative habit. Through habit, we reconnect with and know ourselves again as a creative being.

I started this 100 Day Project on May 11th. My project is to read a poem, and write at least one first-draft stanza inspired by that poem. I’ll post the results at www.bradseverance.com/category/100-day-project/

Enjoy!

100 Day Project – Days 7 and 8

DAY 7 (May 17th, 2017)

A. E. Housman
A. E. Housman

Into My Heart an Air That Kills

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

My Commentary

On a murmuring autumn afternoon,
on a sinuous, trodden road,
where elder trees share their secrets
that stretch past our mortal years,
I turn to hear my footfalls in the dust.

Summer is behind me
and winter is in the offing.

DAY 8 (May 18th, 2017)

A. E. Housman
A. E. Housman

Be Still, My Soul, Be Still

Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle,
Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong.
Think rather,—call to thought, if now you grieve a little,
The days when we had rest, O soul, for they were long.

Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarry
I slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn;
Sweat ran and blood sprang out and I was never sorry:
Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born.

Now, and I muse for why and never find the reason,
I pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun.
Be still, be still, my soul; it is but for a season:
Let us endure an hour and see injustice done.

Ay, look: high heaven and earth ail from the prime foundation;
All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain:
Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation—
Oh why did I awake? when shall I sleep again?

My Commentary

The road will unravel
our monuments molder,
The once restless, fleet wanderer,
now hobbled
will no longer travel.

So, cherish your measure of days.
Each hour a treasure,
each moment a shrine.


The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project is a creativity excavation. It’s about unearthing dormant or unrealized creativity by committing to a daily practice everyday for 100 days.
Creativity is a skill. The more we practice, the more skilled we become. Practice takes time. Practice takes commitment. Practice is a radical act in this speeded up world. Through practice, we develop a creative habit. Through habit, we reconnect with and know ourselves again as a creative being.

I started this 100 Day Project on May 11th. My project is to read a poem, and write at least one first-draft stanza inspired by that poem. I’ll post the results at www.bradseverance.com/category/100-day-project/

Enjoy!

Year 2017 365 Photo Journey (May 12th thru May 26th) – IU, Monon, and Miscellany (Part 2)

Here are a few pics from the IU Campus on a perfect, spring day, a few pics from a bike ride along the Monon, and some other odds and ends. Enjoy!

this is a thing. Consider it a challenge, a journal, or a journey (I prefer journey). Take a picture a day and post it to your blog. Here are some reasons why you should try it, too.

100 Day Project – Days 5 and 6

DAY 5 (May 15th, 2017)

John Gould Fletcher
John Gould Fletcher

Chinese Poet Among Barbarians

The rain drives, drives endlessly,
Heavy threads of rain;
The wind beats at the shutters,
The surf drums on the shore;
Drunken telegraph poles lean sideways;
Dank summer cottages gloom hopelessly;
Bleak factory-chimneys are etched on the filmy distance,
Tepid with rain.
It seems I have lived for a hundred years
Among these things;
And it is useless for me now to make complaint against them.
For I know I shall never escape from this dull barbarian country,
Where there is none now left to lift a cool jade winecup,
Or share with me a single human thought.

My Commentary

Hyperborean born
a million miles from the sun
among the torpid, unblinking sons
of mortar, bricks, and pyrite thrones.

DAY 6 (May 16th, 2017)

John Gould Fletcher
John Gould Fletcher

Tide of Storms

Allegro con fuoco

Crooked, crawling tide with long wet fingers
Clutching at the gritty beach in the roar and spurt of spray,
Tide of gales, drunken tide, lava-burst of breakers,
Black ships plunge upon you from sea to sea away.

Shattering tide, tide of winds, tide of the long still winter,
What matter though ships fail, men sink, there vanish glory?
War-clouds shall hurl their stinging sleet upon our last adventure,
Night-winds shall brokenly whisper our bitter, tragic story.

My Commentary

I sink into the slumbering, loving clutches of the briny deep,
having spent my patrimony on the broken crags
of this awful, delightful, bequeathed world.
How will my accounts be settled or will they be settled at all?
The market, too, will be washed away with the tide.


The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project is a creativity excavation. It’s about unearthing dormant or unrealized creativity by committing to a daily practice everyday for 100 days.
Creativity is a skill. The more we practice, the more skilled we become. Practice takes time. Practice takes commitment. Practice is a radical act in this speeded up world. Through practice, we develop a creative habit. Through habit, we reconnect with and know ourselves again as a creative being.

I started this 100 Day Project on May 11th. My project is to read a poem, and write at least one first-draft stanza inspired by that poem. I’ll post the results at www.bradseverance.com/category/100-day-project/

Enjoy!

100 Day Project – Days 3 and 4

DAY 3 (May 13, 2017)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Terminus

It is time to be old,
To take in sail:—
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Come to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: “No more!
No farther shoot
Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
Fancy departs; no more invent;
Contract thy firmament
To compass of a tent.
There’s not enough for this and that,
Make thy option which of two;
Economize the failing river,
Not the less revere the Giver,
Leave the many and hold the few.
Timely wise accept the terms,
Soften the fall with wary foot;
A little while
Still plan and smile,
And,—fault of novel germs,—
Mature the unfallen fruit.
Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
Bad husbands of their fires,
Who, when they gave thee breath,
Failed to bequeath
The needful sinew stark as once.
The baresark marrow to thy bones,
But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,—
Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.”

As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
“Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed.”

My Commentary

Another hour alone in the moon-fed night.
I am a watchman savoring every languorous minute
like drops of vintage wine.

I am a blue heron swallowed up in the tall wavering grass
remembering how the wind felt
on my maiden flight.

Another hour alone
with God my only friend
and plaintive thoughts reborn.

DAY 4 (May 14, 2017)

Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell

Night, and I Travelling

Night, and I travelling.
An open door by the wayside,
Throwing out a shaft of warm yellow light.
A whiff of peat-smoke;
A gleam of delf on the dresser within;
A woman’s voice crooning, as if to a child.
I pass on into the darkness.

My Commentary

Searching for something lost
and all my eyes are open
walk a thousand more miles
and with crippled gestures
point to fractured spires
another hollow destination


The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project

The 100 Day Project is a creativity excavation. It’s about unearthing dormant or unrealized creativity by committing to a daily practice everyday for 100 days.
Creativity is a skill. The more we practice, the more skilled we become. Practice takes time. Practice takes commitment. Practice is a radical act in this speeded up world. Through practice, we develop a creative habit. Through habit, we reconnect with and know ourselves again as a creative being.

I started this 100 Day Project on May 11th. My project is to read a poem, and write at least one first-draft stanza inspired by that poem. I’ll post the results at www.bradseverance.com/category/100-day-project/

Enjoy!

100 Day Project – Days 1 and 2

DAY 1 (May 11, 2017

Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

My Commentary

Summer is upon me,
It seems both fleeting and eternal,
like summers past when with a joyous heart,
glimmering eyes, and certain thoughts,
I knew so deeply that this purse of long days
would never run out …
And then winter was fast upon me.

DAY 2 (May 12, 2017)

Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore

Talisman

Under a splintered mast,
torn from ship and cast
near her hull,

a stumbling shepherd found
embedded in the ground,
a sea-gull

of lapis lazuli,
a scarab of the sea,
with wings spread—

curling its coral feet,
parting its beak to greet
men long dead.

My Commentary

I press my temples with my thumbs
and feel my bony skull.
It doesn’t feel like me …
It feels like my skull.

And the skulls of men long dead
haphazardly tossed in a pile
like a pock-marked pyramid–
neither are they men.

But what then am I without this skull?
Perhaps just a wisp of tumultuous,
evanescent time.

My 100 Day Project

100 Day Project

By chance, I learned about the 100 Day Project from a Facebook post. The idea intrigues me, so I’m going to try it.

In a nutshell, the idea is to do something artistic or creative for one hundred days in a row. It doesn’t (and probably shouldn’t) be something grandiose (lest you quit after the first day), but something modest, something that won’t stress you out.

At least, that’s my take on it.

So, I’m going to read a poem and write at least one first-draft stanza of poetry inspired by that poem. This is something I’ve done in the past rather irregularly. The poetry I end up writing isn’t necessarily all that great, but sometimes I’m able to write some intriguing nuggets that I may later expand upon and upon which I might base a full poem. Plus, it just feels good to write.

I’m going to blog (is that a verb?) the poems I read and write. Maybe not everyday, but I’ll compile them in posts. So, if you’re interested in checking out my work, just bookmark http://www.bradseverance.com/category/100-day-project/! I’ll also post them to my Facebook profile, as well.

I start tomorrow! Wish me luck …