Commentary
Poetry and other arts commentary
Arts and Letters
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/12/2015 - 08:40This section of my poems are focused on arts and letters, great writers, painters, and education.
Family and Childhood
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/12/2015 - 08:24This section of my Poetry blog is focused on poems about family and growing up.
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How the world is.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 05/01/2005 - 20:23"White dawn. Stillness"
I remember when I first heard those words intoned.
This is College of Wooster. This is my freshman year. The year is nineteen hundred and seventy-seven. Denise Levertov is speaking at the installation of Henry Copeland as the college's ninth president. I am mesmerized as I hear her read "A Tree telling of Orpheus", and like the tree, I too am changed.
Years later, I read "Chekhov on West Heath"
"This is Hampstead. This
is Judge’s Walk. It is nineteen hundred
and forty-one.
The war? They take it for granted;
It was predicted while they were children,
And has come to pass. It means
no more ballet school, Betty is ill,
I am beginning to paint in oils.
The war is simply
how the world is, to which they were born.
They share
The epiphanies of their solitudes"
