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A platform to express and share your enthusiasm and passion for poetry. What are your treasured poems and poets? Don't hesitate to showcase the poems you've penned yourself!
Marianne Moore once said, "Poetry watches life with affection." In this spirit, poetry itself is an instrument of resilience, reflecting life's continuing embrace of its own implausible, risky existence. Both poetry and life take whatever challenge comes -- painful or joyous -- as a lattice for invention, a chance to increase possibility, variety, beauty, warmth, endurance. Each holds a limitless capacity to surprise and go on.
From Jane Hershfield's Poet's Choice piece with my bold. This is the best arguement I've ever come across for reading and writing poetry! Poetry is scripture.
I'll have to make a point of seeing Jane Hirshfield at the Book Festival (which I can do thanks to you!). That statement of Marianne Moore's is splendid. If you contrast that attitude with the prevailing one that is communicated in the media and often is in evidence here on Booktalk (mea culpa, by the way), well, it makes you think. "Watching life with affection" is very different from what we often do in our cultural warfaring, so concerned with drawing battle lines.
Hershfield's use of science interests me. Some people have said that there's an opposition between science and poetry, but not at all. Science is part of the mix in poetry, or should be. I'm reading two biographies of Robert Frost and learning that he was deeply interested in developments in science and was particularly fascinated with evolution. This interest comes out often in the poems.
Last edited by DWill on Sun Sep 20, 2009 7:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I enjoyed this poem very much. I can see how this poem would be used in hospice facilities. I have to admit, I have printed it out for myself. I am currently in a situation that is testing my optimism, and happiness, and hope, and I appreciate this poem. Thank you. Resilience as a form of optimism, I've never thought of this, but it is true, don't you think?
Very true, I think! I also am at a point in my life that I feel my mettle being tested and was comforted by this poem. I also love that turtles are mentioned in the poem.
Hey, did you notice where Suzanne's gem of a quote comes from? It's in our work book group selection, As I Lay Dying, and is the last sentence said by Dewey Dell, on p. 41 in my edition.
Hey, did you notice where Suzanne's gem of a quote comes from? It's in our work book group selection, As I Lay Dying, and is the last sentence said by Dewey Dell, on p. 41 in my edition.
Did you like "As I Lay Dying"? I had a difficult time with the dialogue, but then again, I feel southern writers have a peculiar way with words. It's a potent little thing tho. I prefered "Light in August".
I like the quote because it makes me feel anything is possible.
Did you like "As I Lay Dying"? I had a difficult time with the dialogue, but then again, I feel southern writers have a peculiar way with words. It's a potent little thing tho. I prefered "Light in August".
I like the quote because it makes me feel anything is possible.
Suzanne,
I think I will like As I Lay Dying as soon as I figure out how all the characters connect with each other and, yes, what the heck they're saying! Faulkner doesn't exactly take the reader by the hand, does he? He sets you down in the welter of the characters' thoughts and expects you to make sense of it. Light in August is the only other Faulkner novel I've read, and I agree, it is much more of a conventional narrative.
Something deeply mysterious happens in reading poetry, something both weirdly familiar and utterly strange. It usually goes unnoticed, unremarked upon. I am talking about the experience of feeling truly recognized and befriended by a poem from the past.
It seems rare enough to connect with another person in daily life, to recognize someone and to feel recognized, to know and be known. And yet how much more curious it is -- how truly unlikely -- to connect with someone who lived thousands of years ago, and to keep connecting with them over time. Emily Dickinson, for example, experienced this connection routinely, and felt known by poets from the past in ways that she was unrecognized by her contemporaries, which is why she referred to her favorite poets as "the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul," and "her enthralling friends, the immortalties."
Sometimes we read the poetry of the faraway past and think, "It's not like that anymore, it's different now, the past really is another country" (the archaic world of "The Iliad" often feels that way to me). But other times we read something and think, "It's still like that now, yes, that's precisely how it is." Epic poetry is tribal, but lyric poetry is interpersonal. It speaks from one interior to another and creates an intimacy between strangers. It enables a connection that can cut deeper than the ones we actually experience in ordinary life, regular time. It speaks to us from beyond the grave. It crosses borders and even languages; it floats down to us through the centuries.
Jason Shinder describes the experience of intimate connection in his stunningly direct and forthright last book, "Stupid Hope." The entire book was written under the shadow and stigma -- the mortal terror -- of a deadly cancer. Shinder tries to come to grips with dying too soon, and his testament shines with the light of last things. He can't linger much longer. He is furious with time, "which takes everything but itself." This gives special poignancy to the experience he names "Eternity." The entire poem is one sentence long -- 12 lines, which alternative between one and two-line stanzas. These create elastic units within the lyric, speeding up and slowing down the rhythm, isolating and intensifying individual moments.
Eternity
A poem written three thousand years ago
about a man who walks among horses
grazing on a hill under the small stars
comes to life on a page in a book
and the woman reading the poem,
in the silence between the words,
in her kitchen, filled, with a gold, metallic light,
finds the experience of living in that moment
so clearly described as to make her feel finally known
by someone -- and every time the poem is read,
no matter her situation or her age,
this is more or less what happens.
.
"Eternity" speaks to an un-antagonized reading that exists both inside and outside of common experience. A woman is reading in her kitchen, but she is also outdoors, like a man walking among horses on a starry night. She fills the silence between the words with her own imagination. She exists in two places at once. The light she reads by -- a normal light -- also has an unearthly glow. The poem recreates a moment so radiant and piercing that it expands and overflows ordinary time. It dramatizes one of the luminous mysteries of lyric poetry.
Edward Hirsch is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Eternity" appears in Jason Shinder's "Stupid Hope" (Graywolf). Copyright ? 2009 by the Estate of Jason Shinder.
Pure chance has it that I have posted two poems contemplating an aspect of eternity, back to back. The Washington Post's Poet's Choice, posted above this post and the poem I posted on the Autumn thread. In both poems a sense of timelessness or being out of the normal flow of time.
Poet's Choice: 'Naked Asleep in the Tub' by Wayne Miller
By Wayne Miller
Sunday, October 4, 2009
"Nude Asleep in the Tub" began when I attended an exhibition -- I believe at the MoMA in 1998 -- of Pierre Bonnard's beautiful paintings of interior domestic scenes, many of which are of his wife bathing. I had just moved to New York, shortly after finishing college, and what struck me about the work was Bonnard's ability to create the illusion of flickering light within a static canvas. Over the following two years, I attempted several versions of a poem about a woman in a bathtub, all of which failed miserably.
I picked up the poem -- or the idea for the poem -- again in 2005, when I'd been living with my girlfriend for a couple years in Kansas City. Now that I had lived with someone for more than a very short while, I discovered I had come to understand more fully what those Bonnard paintings were about: that moment when one's beloved withdraws inward to attend to her interior life, even though you are present in the room. It's in such moments that a relationship can, paradoxically, feel most intimately entangled -- the beloved suddenly recaptures that glow of mystery and distance a regular life together erodes; at the same time, she exudes a level of comfort and intimacy that is only possible after a period of living together.
As is often the subject of poetry, it also struck me how briefly such moments last.
Nude Asleep in the Tub
As if she were something opened --
like a pocket watch -- her body slipped beneath a surface
.
peeled back to reveal its surface --
drops of air clinging to her thighs
.
like roe. Outside, the snow pressed down against the city's
rooftops; a frozen shirt on the clothesline hung slack,
.
no longer cracked and whipped by the wind. And the window
just a slide of silence -- its slip into evening measured
.
in drips from the tap. I found I was alone with her body --
refracted and clarified -- water breathing with her breath.
.
What could I do but watch the lightwebs lambently drift
along the walls? -- as if the room's edges radiated
.
from her, as if I were inside her thought. But then,
even before this could register, the clothesline creaked
.
and the wind picked up, and she stirred, so the water
broke from her into water.
"Nude Asleep in the Tub" appears in Wayne Miller's second book of poems, "The Book of Props" (Milkweed, 2009). He edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.
