Academy of American Poets

Everyday in my inbox there is an email from the website poets.org. It is my poem of the day. These poems all seem to be very recent additions to the world of poetry -- by poets who, for the most part, are still living. Sometimes I like the poems, and sometimes I don't. However, the website has a lot of other features to help you to link up with poetry on line. Another good website for short poems is poetryoutloud.org. This particular website is an anthology of poems to memorize -- so you can search by length of poem, or by author, etc. I think that memorizing poems is great fun, but I understand that not everyone agrees. Still, it is an easy place to look up a poem you might have read before and want to read again.

The poem in my inbox today was by Rita Dove. She is from Akron, Ohio and graduated from Miami University in the 70's. She has recieved many awards and accolades, including a pulitzer in 1987. She is currently a professor at the University of Virginia. She really likes music and plays the viola da gamba and sings. In 1993, she was the first African American to be poet laureate (as well as the youngest to receive the honor.)

Ludwig Van Beethoven's Return to Vienna
by
Rita Dove

Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn,
or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me....
The Heiligenstadt Testament

Three miles from my adopted city
lies a village where I came to peace.
The world there was a calm place,
even the great Danube no more
than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape
by a girl's careless hand. Into this stillness

I had been ordered to recover.
The hills were gold with late summer;
my rooms were two, plus a small kitchen,
situated upstairs in the back of a cottage
at the end of the Herrengasse.
From my window I could see onto the courtyard
where a linden tree twined skyward —
leafy umbilicus canted toward light,
warped in the very act of yearning —
and I would feed on the sun as if that alone
would dismantle the silence around me.

At first I raged. Then music raged in me,
rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough
to ease the roiling. I would stop
to light a lamp, and whatever I'd missed —
larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherd's
home-toward-evening song — rushed in, and I
would rage again.

I am by nature a conflagration;
I would rather leap
than sit and be looked at.
So when my proud city spread
her gypsy skirts, I reentered,
burning towards her greater, constant light.

Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly— I tell you,
every tenderness I have ever known
has been nothing
but thwarted violence, an ache
so permanent and deep, the lightest touch
awakens it. . . . It is impossible
to care enough. I have returned
with a second Symphony
and 15 Piano Variations
which I've named Prometheus,
after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god
who knew the worst sin is to take
what cannot be given back.

I smile and bow, and the world is loud.
And though I dare not lean in to shout
Can't you see that I'm deaf? —
I also cannot stop listening.