The Be-Loving Imaginer

Was Shakespeare Bisexual? The Truth Hidden in 154 Sonnets - "Shakespair: Sonnet Replies to the 154 Sonnets of William Shakespeare" by Martin BidneyIn Shakespeare's 1609 book of 154 sonnets (14-liners), you'll notice the welcoming, inclusive, bisexual sensibility of thepoems' narrator. He gets involved in three love triangles: first a woman and two men, next again a woman and...

The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 63: Con-verse-ing with Stefan GeorgeThe best response to a poem you value will be a poem you write in reply. The superbly crafted lyrics of German poet Stefan George (1868-1923) embody a range of moods that not only charm the hearer by their verbal music but make the responder want to continue the melody and to elaborate or amplify suggested implications. George’s co...

Impulse of the Lyric MomentThe Be-Loving Imaginer Episode 62 Any lyric moment, or hour, or day can be the source of pure joy in poetry writing, as the best poets have known. Here’s how I start my book: opening paragraph with “Ode on the Moment.” Ancient Roman poet Horace in Book 1, Ode 11 wrote 8 lines on “seizing the day” that have resounded through the centuries (p. xvii). Turn the page and you’...

The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 61: Dialogues with Rilke’s Book of HoursRainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote a “Book of Hours.” The phrase usually means a prayer schedule for the religious (breviary). Raised a Catholic, the poet in this book is not a believer in any religion but nonetheless seems to talk to God on every page, for the book is the journal of a search for the Transcendent. I translate...

Episode 60 Goethe on Love and TravelIn episode 59 I told about Goethe’s thinking on breathing as the metaphor ofa lifegiving style of mental health attained in dialogue. Now it’s time to sample some dialogues I wrote with him when we con-versed in my dialogic translation of the German poet’s “Roman Elegies” and “Venetian Epigrams.” My verse replies to Goethe’s short poems copy his rhythms, which a...

Episode 59 Selving, Unselving, BreathingMy latest book, A Memoir-Essay on Literary Dialogue and Two VerseDialogues with Goethe’s Newly Translated Lyrics of Love and Travel, “RomanElegies” and “Venetian Epigrams,” has two parts. My translation of two verse-collections by Germany’s greatest poet will bePart Two. But first, in Part One, I want to show you how I used Goethe’s lifelong outlook to “coac...

The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 58:Revitalizing Melody I’m an experimenter in lyric verse, traveling through space and time to find poetic stanza patterns that start memorizing themselves in me. My attitude is playful: you don’t know what you will find. In this book, I use a form that Victorian poet Swinburne called a “ballad” stanza. I accompany each experimental “ballad” poem with a commentary th...

In stanzas 2 to 6 of my memoir in Byronic-style verse I introduce you to the poem by way of the topic “humor.” In the 336 stanzas of this journal I shift moods often, as Lord Byron did when writing about himself in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.” Then I launch into a sample episode in the mood of comedy. Then, in stanzas 172-183 I’ve chosen an episode to serve that enjoyable purpose. I recalled a bo...

The Be-Loving Imaginer: Episode 56 Religion & Passion: Year in a Monastery The book Religion and Passion in Russia and France offers three psychologically pioneering story poems: Gabri-iliad by Alexander Pushkin (1821), Mythical Book by Alfred de Vigny (1858), and Year in a Monastery by Alexei Apukhtin (1883). In the Romanticist tradition of modern scripture writing, each poet treats a scriptu...

The Be-Loving Imaginer Episode 55 Reimagining Medieval Persian Pub Life Synopsis Pub life in medieval Muslim Persia? But didn’t the Qur’an prohibit wine? Actually, the meaning of the relevant Quranic passages was long and widely debated. Result: Persian pub culture was intense and celebrated with distinguished verse. In this book I focus on a “divan,” a very big “collection,” of pub verse called E...

The Be-Loving Imaginer Episode 55 Reimagining Medieval Persian Pub Life Synopsis Pub life in medieval Muslim Persia? But didn’t the Qur’an prohibit wine? Actually, the meaning of the relevant Quranic passages was long and widely debated. Result: Persian pub culture was intense and celebrated with distinguished verse. In this book I focus on a “divan,” a very big “collection,” of pub verse called E...

Synopsis Episode #53 Egypt, Greece, Turkey Three Historical Legacy Tours At various times I’ve taken “antiquarian” tours of the countries named above, one tour per country, each of our journeys lasting two weeks. The sponsoring firm, “Travel with the Experts,” always offered both American and native-land lecturers on each nation’s history and culture. I wrote a poem a day: 3 x 2 weeks = 6 weeks =...

I celebrated my 80th birthday by writing 80 odes in reply to the 6 masterly ones by Keats and in response, quite often, to his other poetry as well, mainly sonnets.   “46. Ode to My Neighborhood” is a kind of jubilant “happy birthday” response to the pleasures of a peaceful, friendly life; it’s in in the Mr. Rogers style.   “Reply 37: ‘Ode on Autumn,’ by John Keats,” shows you the paradigm I adopt...

The YouTube, like the book, has two parts, each with two subsections.   1a.  Poems 12. Id and 22. Bulbous show how to hybridize a traditional sonnet with a new number of beats per line and a new kind of rhythm unit (e.g., three-syllable instead of two).   1b.  Poems 13. Dividends and 25. Haste show how hybridized sonnets can be used to write “replies” to random passages in the Qur’an, which I love...

Synopsis for Episode #50 "WhenTwo Friends Meet" When Two Friends Meet – it was my friend Shahid Alam who suggested the title of our book. Our story, told in poetry and calligraphic art, is that of the mutual friendship we’ve enjoyed for over thirteen years. What has steadily deepened our friendship is the collaboration, the working-together, in which thought and feeling have flourished....

Here I “interview” a poet I’ve been reading and researching for decades. Poet K. D. Balmont, a guiding light and major force in the Russian Symbolist movement, offered an encyclopedic view of his intercultural, nature-mystical development in a climactic book of 255 lyrical treasures: Sonnets of Sun, Honey, and Moon: A Song of Worlds (1917). I’ve translated these into verbal artworks in English by...

Episode 48 – Passover Seder Hymn           My favorite thing about the Jewish Passover ceremony, or seder, is the After-Dinner Hymns. And my favorite one to sing is “Ki Lo Ya-eh.” I’ll translate the first verse:            TO HIM IT IS FITTING, TO HIM IT IS DUE,          Mighty, supreme in His majesty.          Legions may rightfully sing to You,          Sovran alone will You ever be.          TO...

Episode 47 – Wordsongs for Music Celebrating my 80th birthday (April 21, 1923) with this book, I couldn’t wait to share wordsongs with you, and I put the first one right on the back cover. It’s called “March 1, 2022.” I’ll give you a few more samples of my 100 singable poems. They’re in all sorts of rhythms and rhyme schemes and stanza patterns. (1) 49 Newspaper p. 15 (2) 23 Kintsugi p. 18 (3) 29...

The Beloving Imaginer Episode 46 Poe in Russia, “The Bells” You’ve heard, maybe too often, about what may be “lost in translation,” but my reading tonight is designed to show that translation may also offer huge dividends, windfall profits. That’s what happened when Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont made a Russian version of Edgar Allan Poe’s experimental poem, “The Bells,” a rendering which I, in tu...

The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 45 Samples from Three Books It’s a joy to offer samples from three of my recent books of poems. From More Four! Four Beats Four Lines, Four Stanzas: 330 Four Wordsongs I offer 4 samples: (18) Jeer, (26) Nose, (103) Psalming, and (201) Sheheḥyananu (You Who Have Kept Us Alive). They contribute to the theme of being a Jewish American. From Asclepiadic Explorer: 99 Poem...

The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 44 - A Song for Sappho Sappho (ca. 610 BCE to 570 BCE) is the earliest woman poet we know of in Western literature. [Moses’ sister Miriam, called a “prophet” (“neviah”), leads the liberated Jews in a song of triumph in Exodus, but the two verses that she recites cannot be proved to be her own compositions; they may have been excerpted from a psalm by her brother.] 1...

Playful Warm-ups (173) It’s time (174) Continued (175) Conclamant (176) From Chaucer to Me (177) Hispanic (178) Chaucer Varied Applications (234) Early Memory (235) Capriccio in Rhyme Royal (236) Psalm 150 in Rhyme Royal (237) What Never Wasn’t There (238) Cup of Kindness (245) In and Out, Give and Take (246) Enigmatic Solitude (247) Quarantine (267) Joyce and Me

In this second episode from my latest book High Five! The William Shakespeare Beat is Back I’ll offer examples of what can happen when you revive the 5-beat line (and ONE, and TWO, and THREE, and FOUR, and FIVE) that the world’s greatest verse writer used in all his plays. Reviving Shakespeare, you also revive Keats, whose six great odes are mostly in iambic pentameter, as well. I wrote a half doz...

Of special interest in this collection of 400 original poems in iambic pentameter is a group of 70 dialogues with Spanish folk singers. I selected them to represent the main category groupings in Love and Hate: Spanish Folk Songs (1911), translated into Russian by K. D. Balmont from the collection (1882) by Francisco Rodríguez Marín, Cantos populares españoles. These delightful micro-melodies (3,...

Episode #40 Book of the Heaven Eleven (2) As episode #39 offered samples of my 50 catullics, so episode #40 will present examples of my 50 sapphics, another Greco-Roman poetic form that centers on the repeated use of eleven-syllable pentameters. I’ll read a melodious poem describing changes in light and shadow in a room, and then present a metaphoric use of the sun-god chariot. Varying the sun-the...