We sheltered in John Keats’s house this afternoon. (“Hampstead isn’t far; we won’t need our rain wear!”) Poignant, to see the couch on which he retired, the view he contemplated, toward the end of his short life. More fodder for my thinking on poetic tradition: apparently he wrote poems in the pages of his Complete Works of Shakespeare as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost. Talk about responding when the inspiration strikes… Afterward, I barely managed to roll back through The Heath after a phenomenal Indian food meal on High Street. No doubt ghee is now seeping from my pores. And on that note, I’m off to write some gritty laments on the back pages of the Larry Levis book I brought along.
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About
Robert Peake's poems have appeared in Iota, North American Review, Rattle, and others.
4 Comments
funny that you mention poems in the margins. i’ve got an art project idea involving purchasing mass produced, framed art. rather than painting over it, i’m painting with it…contrasting and complimenting the original work with my own ideas.
i’m sure it’s been done before, but it sure is fun!
Really interesting idea, Nathan – sounds like something Warhol would have sanctioned.
Maybe it’s not altogether true that “everything is spoilt by use.”
Where’s the book that, written in,
did not appall the librarian?