The strange polygamous fantasy of a girl aged about ten, imagining all the boys she has loved in her life who march in a row, while she silently listens to their praise for her, counts them, then selects the best one among them. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Par sa tristesse et aussi par les thèmes du bateau, du sang et de la larme, ce poème rappelle un autre, « Chanson », donné à la fin de mon premier article consacré à Minou Drouet. Enfant extrêmement sensible, Minou souffrit d’avoir été exhibée comme un animal de cirque, suivie par les journalistes et surtout accusée d’imposture : on prétendit en effet que sa mère avait écrit les poèmes et lettres publiées en son nom. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Poems by a Little Girl contains verses recited by Hilda Conkling to her mother when she was aged between four and nine. They remarkably combine the spontaneity and unfettered imagination of childhood with a mastery of poetic language rarely seen at that young age. Several of them deal with dreaming and dreams, and then she seizes this as an opportunity for speaking freely of anything in her mind. This theme of dreams sometimes mingles with that of fairies and the “little people” of forests. Indeed, Hilda often walked in her garden or on hills and in forests near her home, where her imagination could flow freely, so dreams and the marvellous will generally blend with nature. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
La blessure de la passion ne se refermera jamais… bonheur de nos plaies éternelles… nous veillerons toujours dans la clarté de nos crépuscules rouges.
Perle étincelante de mes nuits immortelles,
Emblème de mes jours éternels,
Tu es venue, scintillant de mille feux,
Illuminer mes pas de verre…
Tu es venue, mon étoile d’amour,
Embraser mon âme tremblante de désir.
In this beautiful short piece from The Janitor’s boy, and Other Poems, little Nathalia tells how she and her friend fell a sudden romantic attraction for a handsome ice-cream seller. Very sensuously, she called him “very scrumptious,” as if he was himself an ice-cream. Here Flatbush is a neighbourhood of Brooklyn in New York City. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
I present here a second poem from the collection Al Que Quiere! by William Carlos Williams, published in 1917. It has been transcribed on Wikisource and PoetryNook. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803) combina une carrière d’officier avec une d’écrivain, et il reste surtout connu pour son fameux roman épistolaire, Les Liaisons dangereuses, paru en 1782. Cependant il composa aussi des poèmes, dont un recueil fut publié en 1908 par Arthur Symons et Louis Thomas. La majorité de ceux-ci traitent de l’amour, souvent sur un ton badin, voire licencieux. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
I will present here another girl poet who, like her contemporaries Hilda Conkling and Sabine Sicaud and the next generation’s Minou Drouet, started writing poetry at a very young age. But unlike Hilda Conkling and Minou Drouet, she did not give up poetry in her teenage years, and unlike Sabine Sicaud who died from a horrible disease at age 15, she lived for 85 years, writing poems and novels, also working as a professor of English at San Diego State University. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Baisers
onbon
Mon petit amour,
Tes yeux noirs, ton regard
Transperçant le mien,
Font chavirer mon cœur.
The Puerto Rican-American physician William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), while practising both paediatrics and general medicine in a hospital, had at the same time a full literary career, writing short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations and correspondence. He is remembered mostly for his poetry, whose style evolved from imagism to modernism. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
