Sherry Chandler

How do you solve a problem like “Camilla”?

If you are Andrew Motion, Britain’s poet laureate and the man charged with producing a cheerful commemorative poem about Prince Charles’s impending marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles, none of the obvious rhymes - vanilla, flotilla, Godzilla - seem appropriate, somehow.

Nor would you want to dwell on the pre-wedding mishaps that have filled Britons with such unbecoming Schadenfreude in recent days: the panicked confusion over the time and place of the ceremony; the fact that the groom’s parents will not attend; the lingering specter of Charles’s dead ex-wife, looming like Banquo at the feast.

from the NYTimes. Registration required but still free at this time. Thanks to TR for the link

(Cross posted at the Green River Writers blog.)

Two of the best poets in Kentucky, Ernie O’Dell and David Rogers, have studied with Frank Steele at Western Kentucky University. Frank was editor of Plainsong from 1979-1992 and he and his wife Peggy are co-authors of the poetry collection Singing Into That Fresh Light (Blue Sofa Press, 2001), edited and with an introduction by Robert Bly. The poem below, “Wasp,” is one of Frank’s poems from that book.

Wasp

He looks like a graph that escaped
paper. His fingers reach up and clasp
each other. His body
hangs its long weighted sack
down. Slowly the wings
blink. He
hangs the claw of himself
in air, a talon at prayer.
And when the hum
comes, some current goes
through me, too, the way those
thin black legs wipe each other
clean.