Today's poem Read it aloud by enjoying the condensed essence of poetry. Consideration of the structure, metaphor, and simile seems to solve riddles in stanzas with wit. 'Guinness', 'nun', and 'bees' guide readers to such a playful world by jumping imagination. Cheers! Poetry by Carol Ann Duffy I couldn't see Guinness and not envisage a nun; a gun, a finger and thumb; midges, blether, and scribble, scrum. A crescent moon, boomerang, smirk, bone; or full, a shield, a stalker, a stone. I couldn't see woods for the names of trees - sycamore, yew, birch, beech - or bees without imagining music scored on the air - nor pass a nun without calling to mind a pint of one, stout, untouched, on a bar at the Angelus. (from the website of tate modern : https://bit.ly/33Yq9Xa )
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Today's poem The Courtesan Jigoku Dayū sees herself as a skeleton in the mirror of Hell by Abigail Parry In yesterday's mourning, the television had stayed on, and I was grabbed by the introduction of the exhibition of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年, 1839-1892) in a TV program. He was an ukiyo-e artist, active from the end of the Edo era to the early Meiji era. I thought that my current poem Carnivorous Butterwort ( https://bit.ly/2ZTVits ) could evoke Tsukioka's images. All of a sudden, the British poet Abigail Parry's ekphrastic poem on his work came up in my mind: 'The Courtesan Jigoku Dayū sees herself as a skeleton in the mirror of Hell' in her collection JINX . In particular, the first three couplets in the poem are splendid with the line 'Splender key without a lock, / a speaking clock that will not speak', maybe I can't use such a setting of the persons in the stanzas, for my mother tongue might be Japanese. Who or what is a subject? - I should
Today's poem Google Maps and Youtube are essential for me to read world English poems. The poet and editor Nora Selmani's pamphlet Portraits includes plenty of place names Prishtina, Tirana, Skopje, Ferizaj, etc. in Albania. Her poems allow my memory to come back to Kayoko Yamasaki's essay Belgrade Diary (my title translation is provisional, original: ベオグラード日誌) and the Bosnian War. In the poems "Country", "këngё popullore", and "Having a cigarette with you", there is a mirror ball reflecting, spinning hundred of laser beams of history, cultures, races, and religions. I want to read her more poems with richness of Albanian music and folklore. (Nora Selmani's pamphlet Portraits published by Lumin Press, 2018)
