Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
A poem for the beginning of winter by Timothy Steele
Well known for his critical work on English prosody, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing
- Toward the Winter Solstice
- Although the roof is just a story high,
- It dizzies me a little to look down.
- I lariat-twirl the rope of Christmas lights
- And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
- A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
- Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
- The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
- Will accent the tree’s elegant design.
- Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
- And call up commendations or critiques.
- I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
- Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
- We all are conscious of the time of year;
- We all enjoy its colorful displays
- And keep some festival that mitigates
- The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.
- Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
- But UPS vans now like magi make
- Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
- Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
- The desert lifts a full moon from the east
- And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
- And valets at chic restaurants will soon
- Be tending flocks of cars and SUV’s.
- And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
- The fan palms scattered all across town stand
- More calmly prominent, and this place seems
- A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
- This house might be a caravansary,
- The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
- Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
- And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.
- Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
- Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
- It’s comforting to look up from this roof
- And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
- To recollect that in antiquity
- The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
- And that, in the Orion Nebula,
- From swirling gas, new stars are being born.
Timothy Steele (b. 1948) is an American poet and one of the leading proponents of the New Formalism, which seeks to return to the traditional structures and devices of poetry, including meter, rhyme, and traditional poetic forms such as the sonnet. He is well known for his critical work on English prosody, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, and his critique of modern “free verse,” Missing Measures. Steele was one of the founding members of the West Chester University Poetry Conference, which helped give birth to the modern revival of formal verse. While Steele has generally rejected the idea that his poetry is part of the New Formalist movement (which suggests an interest in style over substance), critics have noted that his work almost exclusively employs full rhymes (vs. half rhymes), and rarely uses metrical substitutions or enjambment — rendering his poems more formal than those of most New Formalists.
Here's something you might be interested in.
A poem for the beginning of winter by Timothy Steele
Well known for his critical work on English prosody, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing
A poem for the beginning of winter by Timothy Steele
Well known for his critical work on English prosody, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing
- Toward the Winter Solstice
- Although the roof is just a story high,
- It dizzies me a little to look down.
- I lariat-twirl the rope of Christmas lights
- And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
- A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
- Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
- The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
- Will accent the tree’s elegant design.
- Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
- And call up commendations or critiques.
- I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
- Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
- We all are conscious of the time of year;
- We all enjoy its colorful displays
- And keep some festival that mitigates
- The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.
- Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
- But UPS vans now like magi make
- Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
- Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
- The desert lifts a full moon from the east
- And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
- And valets at chic restaurants will soon
- Be tending flocks of cars and SUV’s.
- And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
- The fan palms scattered all across town stand
- More calmly prominent, and this place seems
- A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
- This house might be a caravansary,
- The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
- Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
- And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.
- Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
- Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
- It’s comforting to look up from this roof
- And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
- To recollect that in antiquity
- The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
- And that, in the Orion Nebula,
- From swirling gas, new stars are being born.
Timothy Steele (b. 1948) is an American poet and one of the leading proponents of the New Formalism, which seeks to return to the traditional structures and devices of poetry, including meter, rhyme, and traditional poetic forms such as the sonnet. He is well known for his critical work on English prosody, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, and his critique of modern “free verse,” Missing Measures. Steele was one of the founding members of the West Chester University Poetry Conference, which helped give birth to the modern revival of formal verse. While Steele has generally rejected the idea that his poetry is part of the New Formalist movement (which suggests an interest in style over substance), critics have noted that his work almost exclusively employs full rhymes (vs. half rhymes), and rarely uses metrical substitutions or enjambment — rendering his poems more formal than those of most New Formalists.
Comments