Kevin Farnham

Working on "The Autumn Sonnets." My book "Twelve Sonnets: a Defense of Spirit" introduces the work. My wife and I homestead to make ends (almost) meet.

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

@MidgeGoldberg Whoa! Green beans and tomatoes were bad for us, butternut was quite good! But yes, weather's different each year. Where abouts in NH are you?

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

@Poochigian OK, having read the other comments: I had no clue a form of iambic pentameter was intended. I can only "naturally" read (i.e., as if this was someone talking) cackling as being 2 syllables.

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

I have many sonnets about Her influence on Nature (in effect, Nature==Her). Here's A.M. Juster's stellar rendition of my favorite Petrarch sonnet about that:

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

Drove past Donald Hall's and Jane Kenyon's home yesterday, witnessing Kearsarge and stopping across the street at Eagle Pond...

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

@Poochigian To me it certainly does. But if I wrote that in a sonnet, editors would scoff at the line ("You idiotically don't have 11 syllables with that feminine line ending!" or "Whoa, just 4 stresses in that line?") - these things happen when you're not established/famous.

[Daniel Brown @danbpoet]

The late Clive James was best known as a critic, but he was always writing poetry too, and had a late-life efflorescence of it. Here's an example that arrested me when I saw it in the New Yorker:

Leçons des ténèbres

But are they lessons, all these things I learn
Through being so far gone in my decline?
The wages of experience I earn
Would service well a younger life than mine.
I should have been more kind. It is my fate
To find this out, but find it out too late.

The mirror holds the ruins of my face
Roughly together, thus reminding me
I should have played it straight in every case,
Not just when forced to. Far too casually
I broke faith when it suited me, and here
I am alone, and now the end is near.

All of my life I put my labour first.
I made my mark, but left no time between
The things achieved, so, at my heedless worst,
With no life, there was nothing I could mean.
But now I have slowed down. I breathe the air
As if there were not much more of it there

And write these poems, which are funeral songs
That have been taught to me by vanished time:
Not only to enumerate my wrongs
But to pay homage to the late sublime
That comes with seeing how the years have brought
A fitting end, if not the one I sought.

​New Yorker, May 28, 2013

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

@danbpoet Thank you for this, Daniel. I will look into more of Clive's poetry (especially his late life poetry, as he himself is almost suggesting in this poem).

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

@amjuster @SallyThomasNC My "Symbols Infused" (Sonnet 8 in "Twelve Sonnets: A Defense of Spirit") was inspired by my teen son's somewhat similar attitudes...

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

@cjscalia I loved McMahon (Payton too). Yes, "Old Time Football" - you have to be pretty old to actually remember that play (I do!).

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

@Poochigian The transition toward/into novels for narrative storytelling aligns temporally with the decline in study of Rhetoric and the classical languages, and the increase in literacy among "common" people. Poetry imo remains best-suited for expressing/discussing multilayered complexity.

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

@amjuster To make money once, my wife and I wrote a book about MySpace - a lot of our sales were by us personally sending letters to public libraries across the country (you MUST have this MySpace book in your library, it's so pertinent for today's world!"). That might work for your book.

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

@amjuster My wife and I saw Daniel Nava (who, because of his gritty spirit, became one of her all-time favorite Sox) get a hit off Verlander in his prime. Nava also used his first MLB pitch quite well: a grand slam.

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

Poetry momentarily arrests flux. That's its value.

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

Poetry provides a moment of stasis within the flux of Life.

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

@Poochigian E. A. Robinson's a pretty excellent modern (I think of him as "modern", tho perhaps barely) sonneteer.

[Aaron Poochigian @Poochigian]

E. A. Robinson has his moments:

But there, where western glooms are gathering,
the dark will end the dark, if anything.

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

My wife and I live a lot like Wendell Berry and his wife, but we don't shun time/effort-saving equipment like garden tractors. However, since we can't afford to pay someone to fix those things, their repair becomes another (dreaded) homesteading task for me.

[Kevin Farnham @kevin_farnham]

2019 New Yorker interview with Wendell Berry: https://t.co/AULiloFqiX

[A.M. Juster (with Amazon's #1 #Canzoniere!) @amjuster]

#Cavafy, #Heaney, and some encouragement for those of us who fall short of our own goals: