{"id":14049,"date":"2015-06-14T07:47:24","date_gmt":"2015-06-14T11:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/?p=14049"},"modified":"2015-06-14T07:47:24","modified_gmt":"2015-06-14T11:47:24","slug":"poem-19-my-antonia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/2015\/06\/poem-19-my-antonia\/","title":{"rendered":"Poem 19:  My Antonia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Whatever we had missed, we possessed,<\/em><br \/>\n<em>together, the precious, the incommunicable past.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>If you google this last line of Willa Cather\u2019s<br \/>\nclassic novel, you will find out that the book<br \/>\nit finishes &#8211; perfectly, flawlessly &#8211; is part of a<br \/>\nproject called The Big Read. You will also find<br \/>\nthe epigram for the book, from Virgil:<br \/>\n\u201cThe best days are the first to flee.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So what if someone changed it to<br \/>\n\u201cThe best geese are the first to fly\u201d?<br \/>\nIt would still be a proper sentence,<br \/>\nbut it wouldn\u2019t say anything Cather<br \/>\nmeant to say, not that she didn\u2019t like geese.<br \/>\nKind of like when NEA printed up thousands<br \/>\nof readers guides, just as they still have it on<br \/>\ntheir website, with \u201cprecious\u201d changed<br \/>\nto \u201cprevious,\u201d making Cather into mush.<br \/>\nMaking The Big Read into a silly read, a<br \/>\nmeaningless exercise in great literature,<br \/>\nasking what it\u2019s worth if we muck it up<br \/>\nwith auto-correct and don\u2019t bother to<br \/>\nfix it? Pardon this rant, but it should be<br \/>\non record, somewhere, that the last sentence<br \/>\nof <em>My Antonia<\/em> was beautiful, and perfect,<br \/>\nand not to be tampered with. Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whatever we had missed, we possessed, together, the precious, the incommunicable past. If you google this last line of Willa Cather\u2019s classic novel, you will find out that the book it finishes &#8211; perfectly, flawlessly &#8211; is part of a project called The Big Read&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":219,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/219"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14049"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14056,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14049\/revisions\/14056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}