Peculiar to poetry is a preconceived expectation of “truth”. David Orr’s essay in the Times Sunday Book Review captures some of this response in spite of cynicism in the culture about literary authenticity, particularly following a spate of memoir writers whose manufactured memories and inaccurate portrayals were exposed and condemned. Orr starts with an anecdote […]
Poetry
Written on the Skin
Body of Book This is one way to talk about a book: I woke into the locus of my body. In sleep’s thick envelope, what poems fit? Dream-card sealed with a kiss and then sent out. What we meant was musing, nothing else. Did the dream not spring from memory? Remembering who said what or […]
Slow Drip, and an Absence of Edges
A new poet laureate was announced today. Kay Ryan’s story is humble, unpretentious and heartwarming. Here’s an excerpt from the announcement in the New York Times: When Kay Ryan was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, the poetry club rejected her application; she was perhaps too much of a loner, she recalls… […]
Not a Roof, Love
Rent If you want my apartment, sleep in it but let’s have a clear understanding: the books are still free agents. If the rocking chair’s arms surround you they can also let you go, they can shape the air like a body. I don’t want your rent, I want a radiance of attention like the […]
Stevens, Now and Forever
One of my blogging heros and friends is G at Writer Not Reading. She has invited her readers to post their favorite poems so of course I will post mine here since I am always eager to share it. Stevens has been my favorite poet since I was 17, the same year I memorized this […]
Louise Bogan: A Poet’s Poet
On a roll here, with another female poet… I was reminded recently by friend and poet Dean J. Baker of the poet Louise Bogan. (One of her poems was posted here on April 4, 2008.) Bogan (1897-1970) grew up in mill towns in Maine. After a year at Boston University and an unhappy early marriage. […]
Tribeswoman
May Swenson (1913-1989) was born in Logan Utah to a Swedish immigrant Mormon family, the eldest of ten children. After finishing college at Utah State University, she moved East, teaching at Bryn Mawr and several other universities. Well respected as a poet during her lifetime, she is known for her proclivity to closely align nature […]
Hafiz: Tongue of the Invisible
Still under the spell of my friend Andrew’s message to me yesterday (see below), I’ve been thinking about the ecstatic poets, particularly the Sufi mystics—Rumi, Kabir, Omar Khayyam and my favorite, Hafiz. Hafiz, a 14th century Sufi poet from Persia, writes about longing for union with the divine. His work explores the nature of spiritual […]
Surfacing into a New Season
This weekend was like the joyride down the mountain you spent a grueling morning pedaling up. For the first time in three months I had three halcyon days with no hint of that ambient grief that arrived uninvited, filled my front room with baggage and has blocked my view ever since. Maybe it was the […]
Ups, and Downs
In my studio yesterday, I felt some of the old familiar feelings of “flow”, a sense of things that invariably calls up an unforgettable line from Mary Oliver: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” It’s a quiet place, that soft animal of my body right now. […]