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September 2, 2012 00:52
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Nicole's HTML Poem
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| <!DOCTYPE html> | |
| <head> | |
| <title>Planetarium by Adrienne Rich</title> | |
| </head> | |
| <body> | |
| <h1>Planetarium</h1> | |
| by <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/adrienne-rich" target="_blank" title="Adrienne Rich | The Poetry Foundation">Adrienne Rich</a><sup><a id="footnote-1-ref" href="#footnote-1">1</a></sup> | |
| <p><em> Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848)<br> | |
| astronomer, sister of William; and others.</em> | |
| </p> | |
| A woman in the shape of a monster<br> | |
| a monster in the shape of a woman<br> | |
| the skies are full of them<br><br> | |
| a woman<a id="footnote-2-ref" href="#footnote-2"><sup>2</sup></a> ‘in the snow<br> | |
| among the Clocks and instruments<br> | |
| or measuring the ground with poles’<br><br> | |
| in her 98 years to discover<br> | |
| 8 comets<br><br> | |
| she whom the moon ruled<br> | |
| like us<br> | |
| levitating into the night sky<br> | |
| riding the polished lenses<br><br> | |
| Galaxies of women, there<br> | |
| doing penance for impetuousness<br> | |
| ribs chilled<br> | |
| in those spaces of the mind<br><br> | |
| An eye,<br><br> | |
| ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’<br> | |
| from the mad webs of Uranusborg<br><br> | |
| encountering the NOVA<br> | |
| every impulse of light exploding<br> | |
| from the core<br> | |
| as life flies out of us<br><br> | |
| Tycho whispering at last<br> | |
| ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’<br><br> | |
| What we see, we see<br> | |
| and seeing is changing<br><br> | |
| the light that shrivels a mountain<br> | |
| and leaves a man alive<br><br> | |
| Heartbeat of the pulsar<br> | |
| heart sweating through my body<br><br> | |
| The radio impulse<br> | |
| pouring in from Taurus<br><br> | |
| I am bombarded yet I stand<br><br> | |
| I have been standing all my life in the<br> | |
| direct path of a battery of signals<br> | |
| the most accurately transmitted most<br> | |
| untranslatable language in the universe<br> | |
| I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-<br> | |
| luted that a light wave could take 15<br> | |
| years to travel through me And has<br> | |
| taken I am an instrument in the shape<br> | |
| of a woman trying to translate pulsations<br> | |
| into images for the relief of the body<br> | |
| and the reconstruction of the mind.<br><br> | |
| <img src="http://www.sciencephoto.com/image/364484/530wm/V7000470-Cassiopeia_constellation,_1603-SPL.jpg" alt="17th century engraving of Queen Cassiopeia on her throne, overlaid with the positions of the stars that make up this constellation." title="Cassiopeia" height="275px"> | |
| <img src="http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-2004-20-a-large_web.jpg" alt="The brilliant stars seen in this image are members of the popular open star cluster known as the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters." title="Pleiades" height="275px"> | |
| <img src="http://www.sciencephoto.com/image/364477/530wm/V7000463-Andromeda_constellation,_1603-SPL.jpg" alt="17th century engraving of the Princess Andromeda in chains, overlaid with the positions of the stars that make up this constellation." title="Andromeda" height="275px"> | |
| <hr> | |
| <p id="footnote-1">1. “Planetarium” from <em>The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001.</em> Copyright © 2002 by Adrienne Rich.<a href="#footnote-1-ref">↩</a></p> | |
| <p id="footnote-2">2. I sourced the text of this poem from <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175906" target="_blank" title="Planetarium by Adrienne Rich : The Poetry Foundation">The Poetry Foundation</a> and reproduced the line breaks and spacing with which it was presented there.<a href="#footnote-2-ref">↩</a></p> | |
| <h4>Interesting minutia related to this poem:</h4> | |
| <ul> | |
| <li>Adrienne Rich passed away in March of this year. Margalit Fox, the author of her <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/books/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at-82.html?_r=1" target="_blank" title="Adrienne Rich, Influential Feminist Poet, Dies at 82">New York Times obituary</a>, described her as "...a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity..." </li> | |
| <li>Caroline Herschel, mentioned in the epigraph of this poem, was only four foot three. Her parents thought she would never be able to marry and planned for her to be a house servant. Instead, she became an accomplished astronomer along with her (better known) brother, William. Thanks, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Herschel" target="_blank" title="Learn more about Caroline Herschel at Wikipedia.">Wikipedia!</a></li> | |
| <li>Among the constellations named for women are Andromeda (above left), the Pleiades (center), and Cassiopeia (right). The <a href="http://www.comfychair.org/~cmbell/myth/andromeda.html" target="_blank" title="The Mythology of Constellations: Andromeda">story of Cassiopeia and Andromeda</a> is a Greek myth; Greek mythology also has a story about the <a href="http://www.naic.edu/~gibson/pleiades/pleiades_myth.html" target="_blank" title="Pleiades Mythology">Pleiades</a>, as does <a href="http://voices.yahoo.com/a-cherokee-myth-pleiades-pine-1014645.html?cat=37" target="_blank" title="A Cherokee Myth of the Pleiades and the Pine">Native American mythology</a>.</li> | |
| </ul> | |
| </body> | |
| </html> |
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