In this installment, Robert Thomas reads “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats. Thomas’s Door to Door (Fordham University Press, 2002) was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa as the winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize.  He received a 2003 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his poem "Quarter Past Blue" appeared in the 2004 Pushcart Prize anthology.  His most recent book of poems, Dragging the Lake, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press.  He has an MFA from Warren Wilson College. He and his wife live in South San Francisco.  Learn more about Thomas's work here.

John Keats, "On first looking into Chapman's Homer"

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

In this installment, Marie Harris reads “Song from Pippa Passes” by Robert Browning. Harris, New Hampshire Poet Laureate 1999-2004, is a writer, teacher, editor, and businesswoman. In 2003, she produced the first-ever gathering of state poets laureate. She has served as writer-in-residence at elementary and secondary schools throughout New England, and has written freelance articles for publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Hampshire Sunday News, and Corvette Fever. She is the author of four books of poetry--the most recent of which being Your Sun, Manny: A Prose Poem Memoir--and is the editor of several poetry anthologies. She has written two books for children: G is for Granite: A New Hampshire Alphabet, and Primary Numbers: A New Hampshire Number Book. In 2003, Harris was named Library Trustee of the Year by the New Hampshire Library Trustees Association. Currently, she is working on a project involving America's first woman composer, Amy Beach.

Robert Browning, "Song from Pippa Passes"
["The year's at the spring"]

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven—
All's right with the world!

In this installment, Johanna Drucker reads “Stanzas to [Augusta]” by George Gordon, Lord Byron. Drucker is an artist and writer known for her experimental books of visual poetry and typography. She has written and published widely on topics related to the aesthetics of visual language, contemporary art, digital humanities, and the history of design and typography. Her creative publications are in special collections in libraries and museums in the United States and Europe. Her most recent titles include A Girl's Life (with Susan Bee, Granary), Quantum (Druckwerk), Emerging Sentience (with Brad Freeman), and From Now (Cuneiform Press, due in Fall 2005). She recently published Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago Press). She is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Stanzas to [Augusta]"

1

Though the day of my destiny's over,
And the star of my fate hath declined,
Thy soft heart refused to discover
The faults which so many could find;
Though thy soul with my grief was acquainted,
It shrunk not to share it with me,
And the love which my spirit hath painted
It never hath found but in thee.

2

Then when nature around me is smiling
The last smile which answers to mine,
I do not believe it beguiling
Because it reminds me of thine;
And when winds are at war with the ocean,
As the breasts I believed in with me,
If their billows excite an emotion
It is that they bear me from thee.

3

Though the rock of my last hope is shiver'd,
And its fragments are sunk in the wave,
Though I feel that my soul is deliver'd
To pain--it shall not be its slave.
There is many a pang to pursue me:
They may crush, but they shall not contemn--
They may torture, but shall not subdue me--
'Tis of thee that I think--not of them.

4

Though human, thou didst not deceive me,
Though woman, thou didst not forsake,
Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me,
Though slander'd, thou never could'st shake,--
Though trusted, thou didst not betray me,
Though parted, it was not to fly,
Though watchful, 'twas not to defame me,
Nor, mute, that the world might belie.

5

Yet I blame not the world, nor despise it,
Nor the war of the many with one--
If my soul was not fitted to prize it
'Twas folly not sooner to shun:
And if dearly that error hath cost me,
And more than I once could foresee,
I have found that, whatever it lost me,
It could not deprive me of thee.

6

From the wreck of the past, which hath perish'd,
Thus much I at least may recall,
It hath taught me that what I most cherish'd
Deserved to be dearest of all:
In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

In this installment, Bill Berkson reads “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Berkson is a poet, art critic, and professor of Liberal Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. His books of poetry include Serenade, Fugue State, a collection of his 1960s collaborations with Frank O'Hara entitled Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings, and Gloria (with etchings by Alex Katz). The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings, a selection of his criticism, appeared from Qua Books in 2004.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.