Counting The Mad

[hubag bohol]

Counting The Mad
by Donald Justice





This one was put in a jacket,
This one was sent home,
This one was given bread and meat
But would eat none,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.


This one looked at the window
As though it were a wall,
This one saw things that were not there,
This one things that were,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.


This one thought himself a bird,
This one a dog,
And this one thought himself a man,
An ordinary man,
And cried and cried No No No No
All day long.

[balong]

dont make me madder. i have warned you so many times. kong mo sigi ka, naa ra nimo. hihihi

[hubag bohol]

Donald Justice, 78; Pulitzer-Winning 'Ultimate Poet's Poet'
http://articles.latimes.com/
August 16, 2004|Elaine Woo | Times Staff Writer


When Dana Gioia, the poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, spoke last week of his friend Donald Justice, he could not avoid reciting some of his favorite Justice poems. That is a common response among poets, a jealous and competitive lot who do not easily offer such tribute to one of their own.

Justice, who was 78 and had pneumonia and Parkinson's disease when he died Aug. 6 in Iowa City, Iowa, was one for whom they made singular exception. He published just a dozen volumes over a four-decade career (his "Collected Poems" will be published this week), but he won nearly every top prize in American poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 and the Bollingen Prize in 1991. He was offered the position of poet laureate by the Library of Congress last year but declined it because of poor health.

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Called "the ultimate poet's poet" by Gioia, Justice was revered for spare, elegant writing that displayed an encyclopedic embrace and masterly reinvention of traditional forms, including the sonnet, villanelle and sestina. He also wrote syllabics, couplets, free verse, epigrams, ballads and odes.

His inspirations were similarly diverse, from Baudelaire and Wallace Stevens to blues lyrics and nursery rhymes. This eclecticism produced powerful effects, as in "Counting the Mad," an early poem about madness and despair that owes much to the architecture of a children's ditty, "This Little Piggy":

This one was put in a jacket,

This one was sent home,

This one was given bread and meat

But would eat none,

And this one cried No No No No

All day long.

"He took this cute, little baby's rhyme and filled it with the most horrifying material," said poet and longtime friend Robert Mezey. "If he had written nothing else but 'Counting the Mad' he would be immortal."

[balong]

[hubag bohol]

Counting The Mad

So far, only one. Daghan lang og personalities...

[diablo]