Introduction, by Airini Beautrais

Neil, you were six weeks dead
when I was born, the last hours
of 1982. Almost thirty years
have gone by since then.

Driving through Whanganui,
I can't get my head around the streets.
Parallel to the river, or perpendicular?
The map in my mind is a map of the past,

probably never accurate to begin with.
The river has this kink in it, difficult
to align to. I often drive around that bend,
the

The Poetry of Michelangelo

The Statue of David, completed by Michelangelo in 1504,
is one of the most renowned works of the Renaissance.

In writing a post about Michelangelo and his paintings for the Sistine Chapel for another blog, I came across a part of his life I had never known.Almost everyone knows his paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and we know some of his sculpture, such as the David and Piet�.  I don't think many people know about his poetry.


I think that my first real encounter with the life of Michelangelo was watching the film The Agony and the Ecstasy back in the mid-1960s. (I didn't read the best-selling biographical novel by Irving Stone that it was based on.)  I was impressed by the story of those four years he spent completing the paintings that decorate the ceiling of the chapel.

I wrote a poem on my daily poem site this past week and realized later that I had used the same title and a very similar experience for an earlier poem this year. Later, I discovered an even earlier version of the idea in a notebook from 6 years ago. My aging memory and its lapses made me read more about the later years of Michelangelo's life and it was news to me that he turned to writing poetry.
His sexuality is somewhat in question but it is clearly a part of his poetry. He wrote over three hundred sonnets and madrigals.

The longest sequence were written to Tommaso dei Cavalieri. He met Tommasso when he was 57 and Tommasso was 23 years old. The Tommasso poems are the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue addressed by one man to another. It's a bit surprising to me to realize that Shakespeare's sonnets to the "fair youth" were written only 50 years after Michelangelo's sonnets.

This led me to find a copy of The Complete Poems of Michelangelo at the library.

In a poem to Cavalieri, he writes:

Nay, things that suffer death, quench not the fire
Of deathless spirits; nor eternity
Serves sordid Time, that withers all things rare.

And Cavalieri replied in a letter: "I swear to return your love. Never have I loved a man more than I love you, never have I wished for a friendship more than I wish for yours."

The young nobleman was exceptionally handsome, and his appearance seems to have fit the artist's notions of ideal masculine beauty.  Michelangelo described him as "light of our century, paragon of all the world."

They remained lifelong friends, and Cavalieri was present at the artist's death. Scholars still dispute whether this was a homosexual or paternal relationship.

My lover stole my heart, just over there
� so gently! � and stole much more, my life as well.
And there, all promise, first his fine eyes fell
on me, and there his turnabout meant no.
He manacled me there; there let me go;
There I bemoaned my luck; with anguished eye
watched, from this very rock, his last goodbye
as he took myself from me, bound who knows where.

His homoerotic poetry was something that later generations were uncomfortable with and it never really came into popular books and films about his life. Michelangelo's grandnephew, Michelangelo the Younger, published the poems in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed to be feminine. The gender was restored to male in John Addington Symonds' translation into English in 1893. in 1547.

    Why should I seek to ease intense desire
    With still more tears and windy words of grief?
    If only chains and bands can make me blest,
    No marvel if alone and naked I go
    An armed Cavaliere's captive and slave confessed.

"Cavaliere" or "cavalry man" is also a play on Cavalieri.

Michelangelo, Self-Portrait

Michelangelo never married and it is unclear whether he had any longterm physical relationship with anyone.  He did have a great love for the poet and noble widow Vittoria Colonna, whom he met in Rome in 1536 or 1538. She was in her late forties and he was in her early 60s at the time.

Colonna's poetry and her zealous religious beliefs greatly influenced Michelangelo and led to his devout interest in Church reform. Although Colonna was apparently physically unattractive, she was the subject of many of Michelangelo's love poems, and she appears to have been the only woman with whom the reclusive artist ever had a serious relationship. They wrote sonnets for each other and their friendship remained important to Michelangelo until her death. When Colonna died suddenly in 1547 at the age of fifty-seven, Michelangelo was heartbroken, and her death ended the period of his greatest love poetry.

ON THE BRINK OF DEATH


Now hath my life across a stormy sea
Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all
Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall
Of good and evil for eternity.
Now know I well how that fond phantasy
Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall
Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal
Is that which all men seek unwillingly.
Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed,
What are they when the double death is nigh?
The one I know for sure, the other dread.
Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
My soul that turns to His great love on high,
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.

Following a brief illness, Michelangelo died on February 18, 1564�just weeks before his 89th birthday�at his home in Rome. A nephew bore his body back to Florence, where he was revered by the public as the "father and master of all the arts," and was laid to rest at the Basilica di Santa Croce�his chosen place of burial.

On Writing and On Being A Poet

"To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." - David McCullough

"Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards."- Henry Miller on writing.

"It will come if it is there, and if you will let it come.� - Gertrude Stein

"If I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it�s always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told. It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there�s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination."  -  Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez

"Ars Poetica" is Archibald MacLeish's 1926 poem that references Horace's treatise by that name (translated as "Art of Poetry"), which was written in the first century A.D. Horace's intent was to write a how-to on writing poetry. MacLeish's poem begins:

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown�

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

Outpost, by Lindsay Pope

March, 1941.

The coast is a scribble. Stars are stored in a
wooden box on my shelf. It is more black than
white here. Like algebra but colder.

The hut�s walls are a ghetto of mice. Those I
catch become whiskers of smoke in the firebox.

I attend to the scratching radio.

This is not my dream.


July, 1942.

The short days are long here. Morse code
stutters in my aerial.

Every door of the home

Taylor Swift Or T. S. Eliot?

Let us go then, you and I / knew you were trouble when you walked in.

A friend sent me a link to one of those online quizzes. "It's about poetry," she said, "I figured you'd like it."

It is called "Who Said It: Taylor Swift Or T. S. Eliot?"

Yes, it gives you a line and you have to identify the author - T.S. or the other T.S.

Pretty easy, right?   I mean T.S. Eliot is a really famous and serious dead male poet. And Taylor Swift is a really famous living female singer/songwriter. (She does have an an author page on Amazon too. In fact, she has things in almost every department. She is an industry. No sign of any T.S. Eliot pens or t-shirts.)

You'd be surprised how tricky the quiz can be.

The first three lines in the quiz are:

"I am glad you have a cat."

"Hold tight, hold tight."

"You are the music, while the music lasts."

We know Eliot had his cat poems.  The second line could be anyone.  The third... is that music word in there to make us think of Taylor?

Do you dare to try?

Go to http://www.buzzfeed.com/jenniferschaffer/who-said-it-taylor-swift-or-t-s-eliot

You are nocturnal but I am an insomniac, by Ruth Corkill

At first I thought it might be comforting,
another body breathing in the dark
smelling spiced, content to be awake
reading in the little dome of light
from your night stand that leaves
my side rich in shapes and shadows.

I am heavy on the mattress
head cricked to one side to stare
at the dry pages and harsh hands.
You give me smiles and stroke my hair
sometimes make honey drinks or tea
bring

Here we give thanks (after Gregory O�Brien) by Mary-Jane Duffy