- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
-
1 Kindred Spirits -
2 Intimacy in Language -
3 Laughter for Dessert -
4 The Poetry of Ping-Pong -
5 Days of Chess and Backgammon -
6 Inventing a Language for Love -
7 Poetry on the Porch -
8 All My Trials -
9 The AIDS Poets -
10 Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down? -
11 The POEMobile Dreams of Peace -
12 Free Market Flavor -
13 The Poetry in Science -
14 Navigating Transitions -
15 The Human Unit of Time -
16 Your Body as Symbol -
17 Intimations of Immortality -
18 God Is in the Details -
19 Breath on the Mirror -
20 The Best Stories versus My Story -
21 The Grease Lamp’s Flicker and Flare -
22 Lion’s Gate -
23 Rock and Word - For Further Reading
- Permissions
Poetry on the Porch
Poetry on the Porch
A Time Set Aside
- Chapter:
- (p.89) 7 Poetry on the Porch
- Source:
- The Poetry of Everyday Life
- Author(s):
Steve Zeitlin
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
In this chapter, the author recalls how his family would spend afternoons and evenings reading poems on the screened porch overlooking the sand dunes, the beach, and the sea in a rented house in Garden City, South Carolina. His father-in-law, Lucas, eagerly anticipates those times, bringing along his 101 Favorite Poems, published in 1929. But they all bring a few poems to the porch—even the children. At age ten their nephew Aidan Powers came equipped with a full set of Shel Silverstein's ingenious poetry. Masterpieces and ditties are treated with equal weight: poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron are interspersed with children's poetry and nonsense verses. The evenings of poetry reading on the porch at the beach were so enjoyed by the family that they spawned poetry nights in the Dargan living room back in Darlington, South Carolina, on a weekly basis.
Keywords: family, poetry reading, poems, porch, beach, South Carolina, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, poetry
Cornell Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
-
1 Kindred Spirits -
2 Intimacy in Language -
3 Laughter for Dessert -
4 The Poetry of Ping-Pong -
5 Days of Chess and Backgammon -
6 Inventing a Language for Love -
7 Poetry on the Porch -
8 All My Trials -
9 The AIDS Poets -
10 Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down? -
11 The POEMobile Dreams of Peace -
12 Free Market Flavor -
13 The Poetry in Science -
14 Navigating Transitions -
15 The Human Unit of Time -
16 Your Body as Symbol -
17 Intimations of Immortality -
18 God Is in the Details -
19 Breath on the Mirror -
20 The Best Stories versus My Story -
21 The Grease Lamp’s Flicker and Flare -
22 Lion’s Gate -
23 Rock and Word - For Further Reading
- Permissions
