#my creative writing society meeting was on sonnets

[godreallyisawoman]

fungi

you feed on the dead thing in the grass verge

secreting enzymes, raze life to the bone

nitrogen cycle - poison used to purge

symbiosis, your relationship honed

/

you consume and lead to new life in bloom

but you hide, deep and dark in the black rot

to unadjusted eyes you sit in gloom

but botanists always have a soft spot 

/

your presence can cause some people to start 

yet all I ever think of you is art 

[corkcitylibraries]

Cork in Verse | Ana Spehar Interviews Mona Lynch

Mona Lynch graduated with an MA in Creative Writing in UCC in 2018. She is a poet, a short story writer and memoirist. She was invited to read at the opening of the Cork International Poetry festival in 2022. Her work has been published in the Examiner, Echo, Quarryman. Howl Magazine, Swerve, Voices from the Land, The World Transformed Anthology and currently has a poem on the Blarney walk as part of Patricia Looney’s Cork City Library Poetry in the Park project.She has been awarded grants by Munster Literature Society and The Arts Council.

Is there a common theme, style or structure you find yourself leaning to in your poems? Where do you seek inspiration from?

For the moment, the theme of my poems seems to be memoir related to where I grew up. My village, which I left to marry aged 21 in 1962, holds so many memories. Blarney is well known as a tourist destination, but there is, and always was, so much more to it. Once, the area of highest employment in Ireland with its woollen mills, paper mills and its famous Hydrotherapy unit. I like to write about the countryside there, my schooldays and home life. I like free verse, and if undecided about form I fall back on two-line verses, couplets.

I love the challenge of trying the different poetic forms as in Sonnets, villanelles etc. I am trying now to write a Flaneur, to wander around Cork city and write about its people and society.

Would you look on writing as a kind of spiritual practice?

I’m not sure if writing is a spiritual practice but I do find it calming. In 2016 I was seventy-five, my grandchildren grown up, when I decided to try something new, with no formal education past the age of sixteen, I was delighted to be accepted in UCC to do a master’s in creative writing. At that stage poetry was of no particular interest to me, but I had to choose it as a module in the course. There, I met poet Leanne O Sullivan and from the first class with Leanne I felt something fall into place in my life, like it was something I always needed but didn’t realise.

Do you have a favourite writing space? How often do you write?

My favourite writing space is in a spare bedroom, with my desk overlooking the garden. I write every day; I have no routine. I wish I was more at home with technology and could record as I drive or walk around. I find I do my best writing in my head when driving my car, and it’s gone when I get home. I have always loved light classical music and use music as a subject in my poems sometimes. Currently I am working on my first poetry collection, and I am being mentored by the wonderful poet Tom McCarthy with the help of an Arts Council grant. I belong to a few groups who meet on Zoom and keeping up with their prompts and challenges is also demanding.

What advice would you give to someone who just started writing?

Let nothing stop you, no one has your voice, your story, it needs to be heard. Find other people who write, join a group. Feedback is healthy and necessary for your work to develop.  Read, read, and read again other poets, some you won’t like or understand, but there will be loads of people whose poems resonate with you, but keep your own voice and develop your skills. Get a list from the Irish Writers website of places to send your poems and send them off, get used to rejection, but the joy of having one accepted makes it all worthwhile.

What book would you recommend to our readers?

There are loads of books out there, but top of my list would be a book from Tech Yourself series Write Poetry and get it Published by Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams and the other book is Writing Alone and with Others by Pat Schneider.

Reverberations

My heart knows the taste of the earth there,

the zing of rain on my face.

The fields, roads, bear my footprints.

While sand seeps through time, I need to go back,

battle with the traffic today,

where once only the local hackney reigned.

The bell rings out full of depth, a voice calls,

drawing the parish together,

a network of fields, lake, woods, even a castle.

Across from the church stands the factory gates, quiet now.

Once, its discordant hooter vied for attention with the bell.

 It called women in wrap- around aprons,

skilled at warping and weaving.

men in overalls, rags dangling

from back pockets kept the machines singing.

They gathered again on Sundays answering the bell.

In polished shoes and white collars, they came.

while I knelt and watched my freckle faced brother

the altar boy, in his starched surplice and soutane

swinging the thurible, participating in a world

closed to us girls. We all took steps to freedom,

but chains of memory shackle us.

Daily Rituals

Every day my mother made a wheel of soda bread,

one foot round, deep crossed.

While it cooled on the windowsill,

 she climbed the cobbles, to the sound of the Angelus bell

 from the church on the hill,

to be enfolded in a cloak of incense,

 lulled by the tinkling of the thurible.

She was playing Forty-Five in Christy’s Hotel

 the night the ambulance took her.

She played a trump card and collapsed.

Later when I visited, she told me

 she promised the Sacred Heart she would give up the fags

if he gave her another chance.

How do I make the soda bread, I asked?

A fist of brown, a fist of white

A pinch of soda, a pinch of salt

Sour milk to mix, she rhymed.

I mixed, I stirred,

Even the dog declined.

I never felt the weight of her fist, or the size of her pinch.

[nataliesewell]

monster prom pop quiz results

I was bored, so I decided to try and record all the questions and answers in Monster Prom’s Stupidest Pop Quiz Ever(tm). It’s really likely I haven’t found them all, so I’ll come back and add to this from time to time.

The pop quiz consists of three questions; the first two go towards determining your highest stats at the beginning of the game, while the third chooses your possible prom date (this isn’t set in stone; you can still try to pursue a different character in the actual game). The order of the questions is randomized.

Other links: Vera Walkthrough

You can find the questions and their results under the cut!

stat questions

What is your spirit emoji?

a. Caucasian guy with a turban because fuck stereotypes. +CREATIVITY

b. Octopus emoji. Best animal on Earth. I know 5 mixed drinks, 3 drug cocktails, and 17 sex positions that involve one or several octupi. +FUN

c. Snowman, because that motherfucker is in the middle of a blizzard and he’s fuckin’ smiling. He doesn’t give a fuck about blizzards. And he has a kickass hat. +BOLD

It’s your chance to fix global warming. Go ahead!

a. Global warming isn’t real. I invented it, and now science is claiming authorship because science is a lame copycat with no original ideas. +CREATIVITY

b. Nah, the world is doomed. But I’ll start investing in ships and start a profitable business for the “soon to be covered by water” world. +WEALTH

c. It’s time to be a real hero: I’ll lead a mission to the sun in order to... invite the sun to the party of its life! We’ll have so many hilarious misadventures that the sun will eventually become... cooler. ;) +FUN

Be a visionary: what will the next big social media craze be?

a. Bull$hit: it’s Facebook, but each time someone shares news that isn’t supported by real facts, they’re taxed, and the money goes to the people exposed to that bullshit. +WEALTH

b. Greek Agoras: like literal Greek agoras re-instated in our cities. Places where philosophy and arts are discussed by the greater minds. That’s the social media I want to log into! +SMARTS

c. Rbert: from now on, a socially awkward guy named Robert will do everything he’s commanded to do through the app by its users! +CHARM

You wish you were raised by...

a. A mysterious old man who saved me from the streets in order to raise me as his disciple in the ancient ways of rad DJing! +FUN

b. A pack of wild wolves... who also happens to be tech moguls who own some of the most profitable companies of Silicon Valley. They would be kick-ass role models AND wild wolves! Sick! +WEALTH

c. A really progressive marriage between a kick-ass venomous snake and... actual fire. I love fire and I see no issue with being raised by it. +BOLD

You build a 100ft statue commemorating an event so that in 1000 years archaeologists can learn something about the people of our time. What does the statue represent?

a. That glorious instant when your friend stopped you from texting embarrassing stuff to your ex while hella drunk. +FUN

b. That mind-blowing twist in your favourite TV show that clearly changed the life of everyone forever, unlike all that boring stuff they show on the news. +CREATIVITY

c. Your least favourite political figure... being devoured by rabid rhinoceri... which are also covered in badass tattoos. +BOLD

Which is the coolest mythological creature?

a. The invisible hand of the free market. +WEALTH

b. A sphinx... who’s super turnt up and ready to party! And she raps all her riddles (she still kills you if you don’t answer them correctly... but she raps the riddles)! +FUN

c. This weird creature I drew when I was six and which is clearly super derivative from other mythological creatures... but it’s super cool and it’s my OC and my spirit animal, okay? +CREATIVITY

You’re elected president for a day. What’s the first law you pass?

a. You can deduct taxes by writing sonnets instead. Amount of taxes deducted are calculated based on the beauty of the sonnets. +CREATIVITY

b. Trivia fact: presidents don’t pass laws... so is this a trick question or are you just being an idiot? +SMARTS

c. One dollar bills will now include a picture of me and the inscription “Beware: Too Much Awesomeness.” My presidency might last a day, but my fame will last forever! +CHARM

A radioactive possum just bit you... what superpowers did you get?

a. The superpower of always choosing the right combination of emojis to get the desired reaction from all people: seducing my loved ones, burning my enemies, settling an argument, and even conveying complex emotional thoughts. +CHARM

b. Uh, probably rabies? I’d go to a hospital immediately. +SMARTS

c. The incredible power of writing fanfiction so compelling that the actual creators of the TV shows decide to go with my ideas and crazy ships. +CREATIVITY

School is outdated and lame. We need a new school subject asap!

a. Critical thought. I mean... damn, this country could really use a subject like that in schools. +SMARTS

b. Turning people into your puppets through emotional warfare and deception 101. +CHARM

c. How to correctly punch a crocodile without terrible consequences. +BOLD

If you had to have sex with animal... which animal would it be?

(You don’t get six answers; the three answers you get are randomized.)

a. A great white shark. I have to fuck an animal, let’s at least make it a story worth telling! +CHARM

b. A swan. They’re classy. Plus it reminds me of that myth of Leda and the Swan, so at least by bestiality standards it has a certain chic appeal. +CREATIVITY

c. A human being, because I’m the kind of douchebag who loves to find loopholes in stupid questions like this one. +SMARTS

d. A purebred horse. At least I can keep his semen and sell it. It’s worth a lot! Who said there was no silver lining to bestiality? +WEALTH

e. A dolphin. They’re the only other animal that fucks just for pleasure, so at least we can both do our best to have a good time, right? +FUN

f. No on can make me fuck an animal. If I fucked an animal, it’d be of my own free will. As a matter of fact, I already have fucked an animal, so the joke’s on you, pal. +BOLD

The coolest reality show would be...

a. Twelve experts on the various arts of seduction live in a house where they must face a common challenge: seducing a potato into marriage... somehow. +CHARM

b. Eight rich people fight in weekly challenges to see who’s the best at giving money to you. +WEALTH

c. People in various positions of power must face all sorts of questions relevant to their field, and if they fail, they lose their jobs... and society wins. +SMARTS

You get the chance to produce a movie. It’s based on...

a. The most influential Russian novelists of the XIX century... have gone nuts! They don’t remember anything about last night and now they can’t find the manuscript of The Brothers Karamazov; and Dostoyevsky has to deliver it TODAY! +FUN

b. Two cool guys walking away from rad explosions. And they don’t look at the explosions. THEY DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE EXPLOSIONS! They reflect on life and love... AND IT IS SUPER DOPE AND KICK-ASS BECAUSE THEY DO SO WALKING AWAY FROM NEVER-ENDING EXPLOSIONS! +BOLD

c. Something about superheroes, but with a love triangle between a beauty yet somehow relatable girl (maybe she’s always stating she’s a mess?) and two of the super hot superheroes, which are also like vampires or pirates or both. Instant hit! +WEALTH

Democracy is just broken. What would be the best way of choosing the leaders of modern society?

a. Whoever can play the most heartbreaking violin solo wins. +CREATIVITY

b. You put all the candidates in an empty room... with a wild grizzly bear. Whoever kills the bear should be our president. If everyone dies, then it’s obvious: the bear should be our president. +BOLD

c. We create a reality show called “America’s Next Top President” where the candidates compete in all kinds of physical and mental challenges. Voter turnout would increase and we would turn a profit on it! +FUN

If you could put a curse on your worst enemy, what would it do?

a. I’d curse them to fall in love with a wonderful person and be happily married before they realize that all this time... their partner was a wild panther in disguise! Then the panther viciously devours my enemy. Classic! +BOLD

b. The curse of always meeting obnoxious people at parties who are super into new fad diets that feel the need to explain them in detail. +CHARM

c. You can’t rely on the effectiveness of a curse. I prefer to take care of my enemies the old-fashioned way: by exposing them to unsafe doses of radiation over the course of several years. +SMARTS

What would be the coolest prize you could find in your box of cereal?

a. A tiny piece of sharp metal, so every scoop will be full of thrill and danger! +BOLD

b. The phone number of the sexy tiger on the front of the box. He’s so passionate about breakfast and health that he’s surely also a grrreat lover. +CHARM

c. A sample of a more nutritious breakfast option, so people are encouraged to stop eating that colorful crap. +SMARTS

What inanimate object do you think would make the best girlfriend or boyfriend, provided you went criminally insane?

a. A human-size pillow depicting a character created by myself. As a matter of fact, I have all the needed paperwork and I’m only waiting for the conservative narrow-minded laws of our country to finally step forward into waifu and husbando territory, as was clearly intended by God. +CREATIVITY

b. A dildo, duh. +FUN

c. An ATM. Sugar baby life, here I come! +WEALTH

Which god do you pray to each night before sleeping?

a. Praying is kind of lame. I have a group text set up with some deities: Dionysus, Bastet, Loki... coolest cats in town. +CHARM

b. Praying is for fools. I took some compromising pics of a god molesting a tree, and now I blackmail him for whatever I want. A lot more effective. +SMARTS

c. Oh, I pray to all kinds of gods. I have this business where people pay me to deliver their prayers every night. I’ve even started to look for a Chinese factory to outsource the prayers. +WEALTH

prom date questions

What is the sexiest type of knowledge a lover can have?

a. How to set stuff on fire. ❤️DAMIEN

b. All the principles to build a financial empire. ❤️VERA

c. Lyrics to all Disney songs. ❤️MIRANDA

d. Obscure 80s movie trivia. ❤️LIAM

e. Sports things. ❤️SCOTT

f. How to make a killer cocktail out of anything. ❤️POLLY

Your partner just gave you a cool gift for your anniversary but you totally forgot! Quick, come up with an idea for a great gift!

a. The head of their fiercest enemy. ❤️VERA

b. A silly toy that makes silly noises. ❤️SCOTT

c. The abstract concept of gratefulness. ❤️LIAM

d. A pony. Always a pony. ❤️MIRANDA

e. Anything on fire. Or a weapon. No, no: a weapon on fire. ❤️DAMIEN

f. Anything capable of leading them to an overdose of some sorts. ❤️POLLY

What would be a deal-breaker for a potential lover?

a. The person lacks taste. ❤️LIAM

b. The person is mediocre. ❤️VERA

c. The person is a coward. ❤️DAMIEN

d. The person is boring. ❤️POLLY

e. The person hates the outdoors. ❤️SCOTT 

f. The person lacks manners. ❤️MIRANDA

What would be a killer accessory?

a. Sunglasses... at night. ❤️POLLY

b. A fabulous purse made from the skin of your worst enemy. ❤️VERA

c. Coolness itself. ❤️LIAM

d. Fancy brass knuckles. ❤️DAMIEN

e. A necklace with your own name... in case you forget! ❤️SCOTT

f. Shiny armor. ❤️MIRANDA

The world will end tomorrow... What will you do today?

a. Nobody ends the world but me! I’ll end the world today. ❤️DAMIEN

b. It’s okay! We invented the apocalypse to take care of the overpopulation of commoners. ❤️MIRANDA

c. I’ll finish my novel... whoever comes after the end should know my legacy! ❤️LIAM

d. 100 push-ups... no, no 200 push-ups! ❤️SCOTT

e. They always tell you the world is ending... I’ll profit on other people’s hysteria. ❤️VERA

f. I always party as if there were no tomorrow... so who cares? ❤️POLLY

Which criteria would you use to name your children?

a. Meh... no name? It’s just too much work! ❤️POLLY

b. I will research for a name that is pun-proof and joke-proof. No one will pick on them. ❤️VERA

c. A non-heteronormative name to give them freedom to define themselves on their own terms. ❤️LIAM

d. Just a swear word. ❤️DAMIEN

e. My name + “II” (the Second). ❤️MIRANDA

f. Something simple and friendly, like Bobby or Mary. ❤️SCOTT

If you were an ice cream... which flavour would you be?

a. Double creme de la Gruyere and meringues. ❤️LIAM

b. Spicy chocolate. No... chocolate on FIRE! ❤️DAMIEN

c. Success. ❤️VERA

d. Tequila and coke. ;) ❤️POLLY

e. Rainbows and gummy bears. ❤️MIRANDA

f. Meat! ❤️SCOTT

What would be your dream first date?

a. An art exhibition experimental enough to give you a seizure. ❤️LIAM

b. A sweaty and manly wrestling match. ❤️SCOTT

c. A professional meeting where you charm your date with some astonishing business advice! ❤️VERA

d. A wild party in international waters. ❤️POLLY

e. A lovely walk in the forest... after rescuing your date from a dragon! ❤️MIRANDA

f. Crimes. ❤️DAMIEN

You find a genie in a bottle. You can ask for whatever you want. What do you ask for?

a. A rainbow that you can eat! ❤️MIRANDA

b. I don’t ask for anything. I drink the genie from the bottle. I can grant my own wishes! ❤️DAMIEN

c. Before asking for anything, you try to negotiate up to the three standard wishes. ❤️VERA

d. Infinite confetti! ❤️POLLY

e. ...His friendship! ❤️SCOTT

f. Him to not be so cliched. Genies and wishes... so mainstream! ❤️LIAM

What would be the most appealing in a love partner?

a. A big... horn. ❤️DAMIEN

b. Sharp wits. ❤️LIAM

c. Kawaii eyes. ❤️MIRANDA

d. A very tsundere personality. ❤️VERA

e. Soft fur. ❤️SCOTT

f. A taste for party. ❤️POLLY

[justforbooks]

Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children.

Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts to Mary Gray Staples and Ralph Churchill Harvey. She had two older sisters, Jane Elizabeth Harvey (born 1923) and Blanche Dingley Harvey (born 1925). She spent most of her childhood in Boston. In 1945 she enrolled at Rogers Hall boarding school, Lowell, Massachusetts, later spending a year at Garland School. For a time she modeled for Boston’s Hart Agency. On August 16, 1948, she married Alfred Muller Sexton II and they remained together until 1973. She had two children named Linda Gray and Joyce Ladd.

Sexton suffered from severe mental illness for much of her life, her first manic episode taking place in 1954. After a second episode in 1955 she met Dr. Martin Orne, who became her long-term therapist at the Glenside Hospital. It was Dr. Orne who encouraged her to take up poetry.

The first poetry workshop she attended was led by John Holmes. Sexton felt great trepidation about registering for the class, asking a friend to make the phone call and accompany her to the first session. She found early acclaim with her poetry; a number were accepted by The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine and the Saturday Review. Sexton later studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University alongside distinguished poets Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck.

Sexton’s poetic career was encouraged by her mentor W.D. Snodgrass, whom she met at the Antioch Writer’s Conference in 1957. His poem “Heart’s Needle” proved inspirational for her in its theme of separation from his three-year-old daughter. Sexton first read the poem at a time when her own young daughter was living with her mother-in-law. She, in turn, wrote “The Double Image”, a poem which explores the multi-generational relationship between mother and daughter. Sexton began writing letters to Snodgrass and they became friends.

While working with John Holmes, Sexton encountered Maxine Kumin. They became good friends and remained so for the rest of Sexton’s life. Kumin and Sexton rigorously critiqued each other’s work and wrote four children’s books together. In the late 1960s, the manic elements of Sexton’s illness began to affect her career, though she still wrote and published work and gave readings of her poetry. She collaborated with musicians, forming a jazz-rock group called “Her Kind” that added music to her poetry. Her play Mercy Street, starring Marian Seldes, was produced in 1969, after several years of revisions. Sexton also collaborated with the artist Barbara Swan, who illustrated several of her books.

Within twelve years of writing her first sonnet, she was one of the most honored poets in America: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the first female member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Kumin to revise galleys for Sexton’s manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975 (Middlebrook 396). On returning home she put on her mother’s old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

In an interview over a year before her death, she explained she had written the first drafts of The Awful Rowing Toward God in twenty days with “two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital.” She went on to say that she would not allow the poems to be published before her death. She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery & Crematory in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts.

Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet. Maxine Kumin described Sexton’s work: “"She wrote openly about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction at a time when the proprieties embraced none of these as proper topics for poetry.” Sexton’s work towards the end of the sixties has been criticized as “preening, lazy and flip” by otherwise respectful critics. Some critics regard her dependence on alcohol as compromising her last work. However, other critics see Sexton as a poet whose writing matured over time. “Starting as a relatively conventional writer, she learned to roughen up her line… . to use as an instrument against the ‘politesse’ of language, politics, religion [and] sex.”

Her eighth collection of poetry is entitled The Awful Rowing Toward God. The title came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer last rites, told her “God is in your typewriter.” This gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing. The Awful Rowing Toward God and The Death Notebooks are among her final works, and both center on the theme of dying.

Her work started out as being about herself, however as her career progressed she made periodic attempts to reach outside the realm of her own life for poetic themes. Transformations (1971), which is a revisionary re-telling of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, is one such book. (Transformations was used as the libretto for the 1973 opera of the same name by American composer Conrad Susa.) Later she used Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno and the Bible as the basis for some of her work.

Much has been made of the tangled threads of her writing, her life and her depression, much in the same way as with Sylvia Plath’s suicide in 1963. Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov commented in separate obituaries on the role of creativity in Sexton’s death. Levertov says, “We who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction.”

Following one of many suicide attempts and manic or depressive episodes, Sexton worked with therapist Dr. Martin Orne. He diagnosed her with what is now described as bipolar disorder, but his competence to do so is called into question by his early use of allegedly unsound psychotherapeutic techniques. During sessions with Anne Sexton he used hypnosis and sodium pentothal to recover supposedly repressed memories. During this process, he allegedly used suggestion to uncover memories of having been abused by her father. This abuse was disputed in interviews with her mother and other relatives. Dr. Orne wrote that hypnosis in an adult frequently does not present accurate memories of childhood; instead, “adults under hypnosis are not literally reliving their early childhoods but presenting them through the prisms of adulthood.” According to Dr. Orne, Anne Sexton was extremely suggestible and would mimic the symptoms of the patients around her in the mental hospitals to which she was committed. The Diane Middlebrook biography states that a separate personality named Elizabeth emerged in Sexton while under hypnosis. Dr. Orne did not encourage this development and subsequently this “alternate personality” disappeared. Dr. Orne eventually concluded that Anne Sexton was suffering from hysteria. During the writing of the Middlebrook biography, Linda Gray Sexton stated that she had been sexually assaulted by her mother. In 1994, Linda Gray Sexton published her autobiography, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, which includes her own accounts of the abuse.

Middlebrook published her controversial biography of Anne Sexton with the approval of Linda Gray Sexton, Anne’s literary executor. For use in the biography, Dr. Orne had given Diane Middlebrook most of the tapes recording the therapy sessions between Orne and Anne Sexton. The use of these tapes was met with, as The New York Times put it, “thunderous condemnation.” Middlebrook received the tapes after she had written a substantial amount of the first draft of Sexton’s biography, and decided to start over. Although Linda Gray Sexton collaborated with the Middlebrook biography, other members of the Sexton family were divided over the book, publishing several editorials and op-ed pieces, in The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review.

Controversy continued with the posthumous public release of the tapes (which had been subject to doctor-patient confidentiality). They are said to reveal Sexton’s inappropriate behavior with her daughter Linda, her physically violent behavior toward both her daughters, and her physical altercations with her husband.

Yet more controversy surrounded allegations that Anne Sexton had an affair with the therapist who replaced Dr. Orne in the 1960s. No action was taken to censure or discipline the second therapist. Dr. Orne considered the affair with the second therapist (given the pseudonym “Ollie Zweizung” by Middlebrook and Linda Sexton) to be the catalyst that eventually resulted in her suicide.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[innately-pretentious]

Hi! I was wondering if I could have a Dead Poets Society matchup?

I'm on the short end of the stick when it comes to height. I look alright, with dark eyes with thick frame glasses, and black hair, although my hair leans a bit on the wavy side. While my closet's all about plain shirts and pants, I have a fondness for exploring outside the box and visualize how I would look in different aesthetic styles. I may or may not love the scent of old books.

INFP, cancer. I'm a girl who's distant and will struggle to mingle with people. Timid, but working on gaining confidence and self-confidence as well as self-love. I come off as serious, but once you get to know me, I'm the caring daydreamer. I try my best to help anyone in need. Also, I'm the type to give away my food when someone asks since I have a weak appetite (which I wish I have a strong one, by the way..)

I love the creative side in general. I like to act, dance, sing, read, and write. I also like to watch a wide range of movies and shows. I like to spend my time doing creative stuff. Whenever I write, I enjoy it when I have a mug of coffee in my favorite Boba Fett mug with my hair in a bun as I write with music (that matches the atmosphere of the scene I'm writing) playing in the background. If I'm not writing out the scenes, I'm acting them out within my room. I'm not a guitarist, but I do have an acoustic guitar in my room that I just can't help but procrastinate on using, so I just strum on it when I have nothing to do. There are times where I speak and act dramatically out of sheer boredom, there are times where I'm a walking and breathing statue. Sometimes, I sing when I hear a song that I like. I also like reading William Blake's works when I run out of books to read.

Sorry if this is a bit much. Uhm.. Take all the time you need! Or feel free to ignore this. Sorry for the bother!

I ship you with Neil Perry!

The two of you would be so adorable together! Your passion for acting probably brought you together, meeting each other whilst working on a play at Henley Hall. He was enamoured by the way you threw yourself into the whole performance, making it his mission to try and strike up a conversation with you. You were initially hesitant to get talking to him with your more timid side, but that only made him more curious. Wanting to learn more and more about the girl who gave her time graciously to others. He loves how caring you are for other people, helping others out when they need it. It is definitely something that he was first attracted to. 

As your relationship progresses, the height difference is definitely something he uses to his advantage, towering over you and smirking as you have to crane your neck to look up at him. He often likes to steal your glasses to try them on, holding them above his head as you jump to try and get them. He says he will return them as long as you give him a kiss, laughing at his antics you gladly pay up. He places them back on your face, tucking you hair behind your ears as he does so. Both smiling at one another like idiots with amusement. You often find yourselves just revelling in the others company. Both with your heads stuck in a book, both in your own little worlds. You often catch him sneaking glances your way, loving the way your face changes as your progress through your current read. The only time it is interrupted is to change the song playing, or to make one another a cup of coffee or tea. 

Cancers are notoriously known to be slightly more in tune with their emotions than the other signs, often feeling overwhelmed when life becomes too stressful. Neil almost has a sixth sense when he feels you getting too overwhelmed with work. Finding you hunched over your desk, snaking his arms around your shoulders, resting his head on your shoulder. He always pulls your chair away from the surface you are working on, insisting you take a break for both yours and his well being. 

One of his favourite activities to do with you is act. Reciting famous sonnets out loud, and reenacting his favourite plays dramatically in his dorm room. Eventually you he plucks up the courage to start inviting you to the dead poets meetings. At first you were tense, intimidated by the thought of not only meeting his friends, but the fact that there were so many of them. He reassured you that you have nothing to worry about, he will be there the whole time. He even gave them all a pep talk, telling Charlie to keep his eyes to himself. Little did you know you had nothing to worry about, within the first twenty minutes of walking to the cave you were talking over each other like old friends. Neil pulls you close with a hand around your waist, proud that you came out of your shell in such a daunting situation. As you become more comfortable around the rest of the poets, both you and Neil act out the scenes you have been practising in his dorm, met with loud whistles and applause, everyone giving him and you a pat on the back, telling you it was amazing. His eyes never leave yours though, loving the way your face flushes as his friends lean in closer to congratulate you. 

The song I associate with you guys would be ‘My Love’ by Wings!

[writingwithinwriting]

Roller Coaster Poetry.

Before I begin I’d like to present a short list of things that I consider poems:

A long list of creative synonyms for dildos.

Several emojis printed out on A4 shown to an audience in succession.

A children’s story about sapient talking vegetables getting eaten alive by locusts and learning about Edgar Allen Poe.

A teen idol meets mutated, disfigured Disney characters languishing upon a polluted shore after being churned through the child star machine. 

A lovely man asks you questions whilst he plays soothing guitar.

A title with silence/a short sentence as a punchline (x3).

A description of how much the author wishes to fuck a trifle.

A collaboration with a Donald Trump speech on what America will and won’t do.

That being said I get very fussy about what is and isn’t a poem. I get very fussy about a lot of things, in all fairness. I complain when poets don’t know how to write a sonnet, I complain when all they write is sonnets, I complain when kigo aren’t used in haiku, I complain when people get sniffy about comedic haiku or sci-fi-ku, I get uppity about randomly selected judges at slams, I get uppity about the running order, I fidget in my seat when it gets near the end of an open mic night and my slot hasn’t turned up and I get convinced they have forgotten me and came all this way on the x39 for nought. My opinion can easily be dismissed in many ways, which is why it is fair to ignore me when I say a poem isn’t a poem.

Why wouldn’t a poem be a poem? Naturally, when it is a roller coaster. Roller coasters are thrill rides that travel in a loop, in which your limbs must be kept within at all times. A poem is a roller coaster when it offers pretty sights, the chance to go ooh and ahh, something vaguely profound and takes you back to the place you started. They do not communicate, they reach a climax and clean up afterwards as if it never happened (which takes away half the fun as far as I am concerned.)

It's not as if a rollercoaster is forgettable, or even unenjoyable! I enjoy a lot of roller coaster poems, they are fun to sit through and to listen to. (Some of my best friends are roller coasters!) But they do not change the world or leave someone staring into the floor, they might leave you a bit shaken the first time, but it's not something you leave silent, grinning, buzzing or welling up, it is something you run back in to and say “again again!!” A hard hitting poem isn’t something that you necessarily want to hear again, or at the very least you need to be in the right mindset to listen to. A great poem isn’t necessarily always pleasing.

They make usually make you laugh, gaze up dreamily in wonder or contain multiple click-worthy lines, but I have been made to cry by rollercoasters. I have also heard them labelled as “wanking on stage” ala Lucy English when it comes to the longer more tragic pieces. I don’t think this is necessarily negative; sometimes you want to read a self-indulgent poem because it will help you recover, grow, learn, express yourself, or surround yourself with positivity, wanking is good for your well being, after all. But it is limited in what it can say, because wanking is a conversation between your hands and your privates, and that totals to one person no matter what you get off to these days.

Ultimately I think a poem is something people can take away from, and it should not be something that you have to sit and think about what it means or what you can learn from it. It a heartfelt pop-up ad that flashes in your brain, maybe not with words but with a feeling that tweaks you.

And the whole reason I bring this up is due to the fact that poetry does have its roots in something more than entertainment and wooing judges at slams. It’s spoken word for a reason; its a very literal response to artists who feel they had no voice or couldn’t speak in the way poetry traditionally expected them to. And if you take away the elements of the political, the opinionated and the emotions that counter what society has wrought on us, then it is neutering its original intent. 

All of the above is pearl-clutching, of course, poetry by attrition will splinter into new ground. And I don’t believe this way of approaching poems is useful for everyone. For me, it allows my brain to shove things in supposedly tidy corners which are really teetering stacks of fragile nonsense, which is what my brain loves to do. But largely, it helps me interrogate my own poetry and trim it into something more meaningful. It helps me critique the voices of the poets I listen to and take what their experiences into the world around me.

This doesn’t mean you can’t take away anything from something like this:

I have probably seen this poem upwards of five times on stage, and I still laugh hard every single time. And that’s something to take away, the joy of laughing at a squeaky-voiced dragonfly with a lust for the blood of Scandinavians and the fact they spelt Connor’s name wrong. That’s not nothing. In fact, this kind of poetry is very accessible, maybe even for kids and teenagers (aside from, y’know, penis and bloodlust.) That avenue of allowing younger audiences to explore spoken word hasn’t been explored until recently. The style of the poems are unique, short poems are easier to listen to. They are informed by the poet’s experience, you can’t deny that, imaginary dragonfly or not.

A lot of people get turned off by hoity-toity poetry which is read fast with ricocheting internal rhyme and rhythm they might not keep up with or poetry that covers deep complex subjects and makes poets around them go “Mmmmmmm...” that they might not get or, heaven forbid, care about. There aren’t always spare fucks, we are all guilty of this. But this fact leads us back to poetry we can walk away from that speaks to us, our experiences alone don’t always allow for pure empathy if we don’t communicate with them as humans.

I think we should keep in mind what we want to bring to a stage would tell us a lot about what an audience would take away. And therefore it becomes less about contents and more about mindset. And in that mindset becomes awareness for other people, and voila, conversation.

[shiro-absence]

Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children. 　 Early life and family[edit] Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts to Mary Gray Staples and Ralph Churchill Harvey. She had two older sisters, Jane Elizabeth Harvey (born 1923) and Blanche Dingley Harvey (born 1925). She spent most of her childhood in Boston. In 1945 she enrolled at Rogers Hall boarding school, Lowell, Massachusetts, later spending a year at Garland School.[1] For a time she modeled for Boston's Hart Agency. On August 16, 1948, she married Alfred Muller Sexton II and they remained together until 1973.[2][3] She had two children named Linda Gray and Joyce Ladd. 　 　 Poetry[edit] Sexton suffered from severe mental illness for much of her life, her first manic episode taking place in 1954. After a second episode in 1955 she met Dr. Martin Orne, who became her long-term therapist at the Glenside Hospital. It was Dr. Orne who encouraged her to take up poetry.[4] 　 The first poetry workshop she attended was led by John Holmes. Sexton felt great trepidation about registering for the class, asking a friend to make the phone call and accompany her to the first session. She found early acclaim with her poetry; a number were accepted by The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine and the Saturday Review. Sexton later studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University alongside distinguished poets Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck.[3][5] 　 Sexton's poetic career was encouraged by her mentor W.D. Snodgrass, whom she met at the Antioch Writer's Conference in 1957. His poem "Heart's Needle" proved inspirational for her in its theme of separation from his three-year-old daughter.[6] Sexton first read the poem at a time when her own young daughter was living with her mother-in-law. She, in turn, wrote "The Double Image", a poem which explores the multi-generational relationship between mother and daughter. Sexton began writing letters to Snodgrass and they became friends. 　 While working with John Holmes, Sexton encountered Maxine Kumin. They became good friends and remained so for the rest of Sexton's life. Kumin and Sexton rigorously critiqued each other's work and wrote four children's books together. In the late 1960s, the manic elements of Sexton's illness began to affect her career, though she still wrote and published work and gave readings of her poetry. She collaborated with musicians, forming a jazz-rock group called "Her Kind" that added music to her poetry. Her play Mercy Street, starring Marian Seldes, was produced in 1969, after several years of revisions.[7] Sexton also collaborated with the artist Barbara Swan, who illustrated several of her books.[8] 　 Within twelve years of writing her first sonnet, she was one of the most honored poets in America: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the first female member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.[9][10] 　 Content and themes of work[edit] Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet. Maxine Kumin described Sexton's work: "She wrote openly about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction at a time when the proprieties embraced none of these as proper topics for poetry."[12] Sexton's work towards the end of the sixties has been criticized as "preening, lazy and flip" by otherwise respectful critics.[9] Some critics regard her dependence on alcohol as compromising her last work. However, other critics see Sexton as a poet whose writing matured over time. "Starting as a relatively conventional writer, she learned to roughen up her line. ... to use as an instrument against the 'politesse' of language, politics, religion [and] sex."[13] 　 Her eighth collection of poetry is entitled The Awful Rowing Toward God. The title came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer last rites, told her "God is in your typewriter." This gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing. The Awful Rowing Toward God and The Death Notebooks are among her final works, and both center on the theme of dying.[14] 　 Her work started out as being about herself, however as her career progressed she made periodic attempts to reach outside the realm of her own life for poetic themes.[15][15] Transformations (1971), which is a revisionary re-telling of Grimm's Fairy Tales, is one such book.[16] (Transformations was used as the libretto for the 1973 opera of the same name by American composer Conrad Susa.) Later she used Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno and the Bible as the basis for some of her work.[17] 　 Much has been made of the tangled threads of her writing, her life and her depression, much in the same way as with Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963. Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov commented in separate obituaries on the role of creativity in Sexton's death. Levertov says, "We who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction."[5] 　 Subsequent controversy[edit] Following one of many suicide attempts and manic or depressive episodes, Sexton worked with therapist Dr. Martin Orne.[9] He diagnosed her with what is now described as bipolar disorder, but his competence to do so is called into question by his early use of allegedly unsound psychotherapeutic techniques.[18] During sessions with Anne Sexton he used hypnosis and sodium pentothal to recover supposedly repressed memories. During this process, he allegedly used suggestion to uncover memories of having been abused by her father.[19] This abuse was disputed in interviews with her mother and other relatives.[20] Dr. Orne wrote that hypnosis in an adult frequently does not present accurate memories of childhood; instead, "adults under hypnosis are not literally reliving their early childhoods but presenting them through the prisms of adulthood."[21] According to Dr. Orne, Anne Sexton was extremely suggestible and would mimic the symptoms of the patients around her in the mental hospitals to which she was committed. The Diane Middlebrook biography states that a separate personality named Elizabeth emerged in Sexton while under hypnosis. Dr. Orne did not encourage this development and subsequently this "alternate personality" disappeared. Dr. Orne eventually concluded that Anne Sexton was suffering from hysteria.[4] During the writing of the Middlebrook biography, Linda Gray Sexton stated that she had been sexually assaulted by her mother.[19][22] In 1994, Linda Gray Sexton published her autobiography, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, which includes her own accounts of the abuse.[23][24] 　 Middlebrook published her controversial biography of Anne Sexton with the approval of Linda Gray Sexton, Anne's literary executor.[4] For use in the biography, Dr. Orne had given Diane Middlebrook most of the tapes recording the therapy sessions between Orne and Anne Sexton. The use of these tapes was met with, as The New York Times put it, "thunderous condemnation."[9] Middlebrook received the tapes after she had written a substantial amount of the first draft of Sexton's biography, and decided to start over. Although Linda Gray Sexton collaborated with the Middlebrook biography, other members of the Sexton family were divided over the book, publishing several editorials and op-ed pieces, in The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review. 　 Controversy continued with the posthumous public release of the tapes (which had been subject to doctor-patient confidentiality). They are said to reveal Sexton's inappropriate behavior with her daughter Linda, her physically violent behavior toward both her daughters, and her physical altercations with her husband.[22] 　 Yet more controversy surrounded allegations that Anne Sexton had an affair with the therapist who replaced Dr. Orne in the 1960s.[25] No action was taken to censure or discipline the second therapist. Dr. Orne considered the affair with the second therapist (given the pseudonym "Ollie Zweizung" by Middlebrook and Linda Sexton) to be the catalyst that eventually resulted in her suicide.[5] 　 Legacy and tributes[edit] Peter Gabriel dedicated his song "Mercy Street", from his 1986 album So, to Sexton.[26] She has been described as a "personal touchstone" for Morrissey, former lead singer and lyricist of The Smiths.[27] She is commemorated on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.[28] 　 In other media[edit] In James Ellroy's 1987 novel The Black Dahlia, the epigraph is "Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator, My first lost keeper, to love and look at later." The passage is from Sexton's 1962 poem All My Pretty Ones. 　 In Kidnap Kid's unreleased track(ID-ID) on Above & Beyond's Group Therapy Guest mix Episode 226 you can find Ann Sexton reciting the poem "The Truth the Dead Know. "[29] 　 　 Sexton's works[edit] 　 Poetry and prose (collections and novels)[edit] Uncompleted Novel-started in the 1960s To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) The Starry Night (1961) All My Pretty Ones (1962) Selected Poems (London, 1964) No equivalent US edition Live or Die (1966) – Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1967 Love Poems (1969) Mercy Street, a 2-act play performed at the American Place Theatre (1969), published by Broadway Play Publishing Inc. Transformations (1971) ISBN 0-618-08343-X The Book of Folly (1972) The Death Notebooks (1974) The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975; posthumous) 45 Mercy Street (1976; posthumous) Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (1977; posthumous) Words for Dr.. (1978; posthumous) No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose, edited by Steven E. Colburn (1985; posthumous) Children's books[edit] all co-written with Maxine Kumin 　 1963 Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall) 1964 More Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall) 1974 Joey and the Birthday Present (illustrated by Evaline Ness) 1975 The Wizard's Tears (illustrated by Evaline Ness)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Sexton

[symphonicshakespeare]

Program Notes from Ever-Fixed Mark: A Senior Voice Recital

An Introduction

Last year, I presented a junior lecture recital entitled “Symphonic Shakespeare”, a study of the adaptations of playwright William Shakespeare’s texts into western Classical music. It only made sense that I should continue learning about the ways in which his timeless narratives and characters were rewritten, redefined, or interpreted by the music in which they were set. This recital aims to address the role of the soprano, which I have come to find in many contexts represents the love interest. It is no secret that Shakespeare’s writing embodies a type of romance, eroticism, and affection that shapes the way we as a society approach and understand relationships. Aside from understanding the significance of adaptation, then, this recital is to showcase the multifaceted and complex concept of “love”.

About the title: “Ever-Fixed Mark” is taken from Sonnet 116, in which he writes: “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove. / O no! it is an ever-fixed mark,” (116: 2-8). I thought it was fitting, as all of the songs on the program have to do with love or some shape of it, to name my recital. Additionally, written notation, music itself is but an ever-fixed mark, bound to exist so long as the score, or even the melody from rote, is maintained.

“It was a lover and his lass”

The arts have intertwined for as long as they’ve existed as a means of expression—and in the English Renaissance, especially on the stage of the Elizabethan theatre, so they did. “It was a lover and his lass” was a diegetic (meaning the music was a witnessed part of the performance) number in Act V, scene III of As You Like It, sung by one of the pages to the betrothed Audrey and Touchstone. In the scene, Touchstone expresses dislike of the song, as it represents little of actual love; its lyrics are ridiculous, overall, it’s silly, and there’s really no substance—but the music, just as love itself, is beautiful despite the frivolity of the antics happening lyrically.

Thomas Morley (1557-1602) was an English renaissance secular and sacred composer, singer, organist, and publisher, probably most renowned today for his madrigals (secular a cappella pieces for six to eight voices). He published this tune in his anthology, First Book of Ayres, in 1600. It contained English songs for voice and lute, and although it cannot be confirmed that this version of the song was used in the production that William Shakespeare would have presented at the Globe, it is known that Morley and Shakespeare, two creative contemporaries, did not collaborate accidentally.

“If Music Be The Food of Love”

Following his death, Shakespeare’s works (as well as those of other authors) were disseminated into spin-offs and retellings by other playwrights and publishers. His portfolio edition of these stories would disappear from the repertoire, but nonetheless influenced English literature and drama for centuries to come.

Colonel Henry Heveningham (1651-1700) created a text, adapted from Duke Orsino’s opening dialogue in Twelfth Night I.i.1-15 as he laments to his attendant Curio about his failed attempts at wooing the fair Olivia. Compare the original text to the lyrics below:

Although it certainly comes from the same place (Duke Orsino’s desperate, fascinated appetite for a humanistic satisfaction be it tangible or expressed through creative means) it’s obviously different. The latter, by Heveningham, is written as a ballad, between two lovers, instead of an address.  Henry Purcell sets this strophic text with word painting, the longing emphasised by a melody that slowly climbs the staff with accompanying crescendo, that eventually falls dramatically at the end of the verse, relinquishing itself to the accompaniment and too, hypothetically, the object of the serenade.

“O, let me weep,” from The Fairy Queen

The Fairy Queen is another example of Shakespeare’s work being adapted after his death. This particular semi-opera, first performed in 1692, is based on Midsummer Night’s Dream—in the spoken moments, the original text remains unchanged, but Henry Purcell (1659-1695) and his librettist Elkanah Settle (1648-1724) change some of the text in ‘masques’, or musical scenes prompted by magical, supernatural, or drunken characters, to fit seventeenth-century dramatic conventions. “O, let me weep”, or as it is more commonly called, ‘The Plaint’ is one of these masques. It was written after the opera had already premiered, as a kind of showcase piece for countertenor or soprano performer—superstars in their own right during the Baroque era.

The Baroque era was the last period in which English composers held strong relevance until the turn of the twentieth century, compared to their continental contemporaries. Henry Purcell was a powerhouse in this regard; he was proficient in various styles of counterpoint yet mainly championed the English Baroque style in his works, composed in both sacred and secular genres with substantial popularity, and also composed for theatre and opera.

“V’adoro, pupille” from Giulio Cesare

Shakespeare wrote the historical drama Julius Caesar in Spring of 1599. The political tensions in England were high, as Queen Elizabeth reached the end of her reign. Subjects of republicanism versus monarchy were circulating, and to depict the killing of a king would be tantamount to treason. However, by using Plutarch’s Lives as his source material, an author that Queen Elizabeth I studied, he effectively avoided the threat of creative persecution. In the eighteenth century, however, the subject of a political history was ripe for opera seria—and librettist Nicola Francesco Haym (1678-1729) created Giulio Cesare in Egitto with Georg Frederic Händel (1685-1759) for the Royal Academy of Music in 1724 during the composer’s tenure at the English court. It was a relatively successful work, and one of Händel’s more (if not most) well known Italian operas to date.

Her presence may be more pertinent in the related Shakespearean tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, but in Händel’s opera, Cleopatra’s affairs are everything but ignored. In this aria, she admires the young, handsome Julius Caesar, lamenting their never to be love, as she’s far past her courting years:

Fünf Lieder WoO post. 22 (Ophelia-Lieder)

The German translations of many of Shakespeare’s plays appeared in the early 19th century, sparked by Schlegel-Tieck’s publication. Among other composers to set Shakespeare’s works, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) approached the setting of Ophelia’s songs in a really interesting way by honouring the sing-song style of the text and folly and falter of rhythm in her speeches, and too had a particular choice of harmonic language. He uses very basic piano accompaniment that resembles a kind of pastorale Renaissance style—in the first and second songs, simpler, lute-like voicings and strophic melodies in the soprano. In the third setting, “Auf Morgen its Sankt Valentin’s Tag,” we hear an off-kiltered compound duple meter that almost feels like the pillars of a village dance. In the fourth and fifth songs, Brahms alludes to a sort of chorale or hymn form, but more notably uses a mixture of modes (variations of scales) between A-flat major and its relative minor key of F. This simple relationship ties together more antiquated musical forms and the Romantic style, which nineteenth-century composers defined with manipulations of harmony and tonal center.

The english translation given is not a direct interpretation of the German lyrics, rather the original text from Hamlet Act IV scene v, lines 23-26, 29-33, 48-55, 165-187, and 190-201, respectively.

“Je veux vivre,” from Roméo et Juliette

The stage of the French grand opera is the perfect setting for the melancholic story of the teenage star-crossed lovers. After his major success, Faust, Charles Gounod (1818-1893) and his librettists, Jules Barbier (1825-1901) and Michel Carré (1821-1872) premiered the opera at the Théâtre Lyrique Impérial du Châtelet, Paris in April 1859, and it rose to great success with over three hundred performances in the first eight years of its lifetime.

Juliette’s aria is a testament to teenage life and fleeting crushes. The viennese waltz setting is fitting for the scene in Act I, when all of the characters are meeting at the Capulet estate for her birthday. Juliette’s whimsy enchants Roméo, and all present. The foreshadowing in the lyrics is exquisite.

“Orpheus with his lute”

Oddly enough, the fervent revival of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century continued well into the following years—as theatres continued to perform his work, it was picked up and circulated. British composers especially, such as Roger Quilter, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Benjamin Britten, among others, sought to honour and redefine their nation’s artistic heritage in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was influenced heavily by Tudor music and brought elements of English folk song into his operas, ballets, religious music, and symphonies. “Orpheus with his lute” is an example of a neo-classical (twentieth century interpretations of Classical or eighteenth century compositional styles) reimagining of Patience’s song from Act III scene I of Henry VIII. The 1901 score is the first of two settings by Williams of the same text.

“Falling in love with love” from Boys from Syracuse

Boys from Syracuse is a 1938 musical by Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) with book by George Abbott (1887-1995) based on A Comedy of Errors. Adriana sings this tune in Act I, while recanting the stories of her romance with her husband to her sewing circle. Love, although promising, isn’t always as it seems. Rodgers used the dance form, the waltz in particular, to set the ‘mood’ of romance and anticipatory or longing emotions. In the age of Musical Theatre composition, the use of these subliminal musical association works to create further drama and ironic or comedic juxtaposition.

The collaboration between Rodgers and Hart was short-lived, and the pair had a falling out—not romantically, but the song holds as a testament perhaps not only to Adriana’s woes, but too their professional relationship.

“The Star Crossed Lovers”(“Pretty Girl”)

“Star Crossed Lovers” is a track on the album Such Sweet Thunder by Duke Ellington and his orchestra, released by Columbia records in 1957. The album is a twelve-part instrumental suite based on Shakespeare’s works, inspired by a visit to a Festival happening at the same time as their Stratford, Ontario performance by the band leader, Duke Ellington (1899-1974), and his arranger, Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967). The album was written in three weeks and performed the next year at the festival.

Interestingly enough, aside from the Morley piece, this is the only selection on the recital that doesn’t necessitate or originate from a gendered performance; rather, it can be interpreted by any singer, as long as it is addressed to the subject of the ballad, “pretty girl”. Strayhorn was an out member of the LGBTQ+ community, and in a small effort to display how not only musical styles but also social ideas changed, I wanted to include it (and this interpretation) on the program.

For full bibliographic references, or to see the project at large, visit symphonicshakespeare.tumblr.com