A worthwhile diversion

Via Americablog, a link to a site worth visiting regularly: Poem of the Week, from Tim Gunn. The selection is timely and the descriptions informative. Among the recent poems, Dorothy Parker's Resume, Wilfred Owens' Dulce et decorum est, and James Wright's Autumn Begins in Martin's Ferry, Ohio:

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

Wow.

Also recently posted here, Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, one of the few poems I loved enough to memorize in full. Gunn says:

The poem is proof of a couple of things: 1) a poem doesn't have to make sense to be enjoyable; and 2) they had mind-altering drugs in Victorian England.