My new favorite TV show, Under the Radar Michigan, featured Petoskey in last week’s episode and showcased the City Park Grill, one of Ernest Hemingway’s old haunts [Video: 12:40 mark]. Under the Radar Michigan and my rekindled interest in fly-fishing and men’s fiction inspired me to give a nod to one of Michigan’s greatest literary treasures. I offer this photo of Hemingway writing while on a fishing trip in Michigan in 1916, and a poem, “Along With Youth.”
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| Courtesy of the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston |
Along With Youth
A porcupine skin,
Stiff with bad tanning,
It must have ended somewhere.
Stuff horned owl
Pompous
Yellow eyed;
Chuck-wills-widow on a biased twig
Sooted with dust.
Piles of old magazines,
Drawers of boys’ letters
And the line of love
They must have ended somewhere.
Yesterday’s Tribune is gone
Along with youth
And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach
The year of the big storm
When the hotel burned down
At Seney, Michigan.
-Ernest Hemingway
Paris, 1922
4 comments:
Hemingway’s short stories will always hold a dear place in my heart. I’ve read and re-read all of them since the story A Clean, Well-lighted Place found it’s way to me so many years ago. That said, his poetry is terrible, in my opinion.
I tend to agree with your assessment of Hemingway's poetry. But since his poems were meant to be tongue-in-cheek jabs at publishers and public figures, I'll give him a pass. A Clean, Well-lighted Place would have been preferable, but I didn't want to transcribe an entire short story for a blog post. Cheers -
I was actually excited when I learned that there was a book of collected Hemingway poems – until I started reading it.
I wasn’t criticizing your inclusion of this poem into your post, merely offering up my opinion. This is the internetz after all. Though alternatively you could have incorporated one of his vignettes from In Our Time.
I’m ready to hit the trout stream.
No need to apologize. I believe we had the same reaction to the poems. I'll snoop around In Our Time and see what I can come up with. Trout stream sounds magical right about now.
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