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On Poetry: Feeling from belly to teeth
I want a good poem to articulate, not to make my life simpler or easier or offer me column-width solutions. I want it to tell me the truth, to wake up my mind and my heart. This poem, by Denise Levertov, manages to make me feel.
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On Poetry: Growing tomatoes up north
In this poem from her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Louise Glück imagines the voice of a gardener speaking to someone who must be God. (Vespers is an early evening worship service.) I love this poem, and the book it comes from, for its unusual vision as it wrestles with complicated questions of love and responsibility.
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On Poetry: Summer teaches us about poems
A poem, if it's working well, if it's good poem, is able to take us inside someone else's skin so convincingly that it turns out we're not really separate from the speaker at all. It becomes our own experience. Not in the sense that we appropriate it and turn it into a poem about us.
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On Poetry: Parents love, wrinkle, die
This poem by William Meredith appeals to me. Meredith gets exactly to the heart of the parent/child ambiguities. He enters the mind of a child, the way we see our parents as impossibly different from us, then what it's like to see them aging, and how we feel, caught in our own baffling life.
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On Poetry: Birds, poems and koans
There's a splendid new book, "The Poets Guide to the Birds," edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser, full of poems with birds in them.
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On Poetry: First thought, full bloom
It's the rainy season here in Traverse City. After the winter we've had, spring makes me a little goofy, which may be why I like this poem about rain and mud and love by Paul Valery, the French poet, essayist and philosopher.
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On Poetry: Keeping readers awake
I once gave a reading with fellow poet Sydney Lea at the Horse Meadow Senior Center in New Hampshire. We were told to get started before the residents had finished their lunch, during dessert, or else they'd wander off to take a nap.
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On Poetry: Immediacy of experience
The great poet James Wright was visiting poet for a semester at the University of Delaware when I was on the faculty there. In spite of his capacious intellect, James and his wife Annie were like the two ponies in his poem.
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On Poetry: Poem for poetry month
Like all good poems, this one makes me see is true in a way I hadn't seen before. It's by our current U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, a Californian who taught remedial English part time for more than 30 years.
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On Poetry: A challenge for Poetry Month
What can you do for National Poetry Month? You might pick up a poem that you find difficult and off-putting but something about it draws you.
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On Poetry: We all come from somewhere
I was thinking how writers need a deep-rootedness, their feet planted in some particular soil. Their poignant images -- whatever makes them, and us, commit to the truth of words -- comes out of the truth of the earth. I offer Bob Hicock's marvelous poem as another way to say this.
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On Poetry: Inaugural poems
In honor of the inauguration of Barack Obama, I offer this poem I wrote when President Clinton took office in 1997. Miller Williams -- the poet Clinton chose to give the inaugural poem -- had been one of my professors at the University of Arkansas. In the poem, I jokingly pout because Clinton didn't ask me, instead.
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On Poetry: Hardy found timeless voice
The best poems find a timeless center of human feeling and articulate it beyond doctrine, beyond dogma, beyond local circumstance, beyond the individual speaker. But to do that, such poems always remain specific, located in time and place.
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On Poetry: Word power makes us listen
As I listen to political speeches and the commentaries following, I think how important it is to hear the exact words, to know their exact meanings, to catch the nuances, to understand the implications of the choice of one word instead of another.
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On Poetry: Politics a strange bedfellow
While we're all neck-deep in politics, I'll offer a few thoughts about the "political" poem.
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On Poetry: Writers gain strength in co-op
It's a thrill for me, too, to discover a writer I admire. It's nice to think that she just sprang full-grown from the head of Zeus, but, like all good things, a writer grows slowly and needs good soil. Writers are the least demanding of artists: they use such primitive tools -- paper, pen (a computer would be nice) and books. They like solitude and silence.
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On Poetry: Slow season lets 'Trout' fly
I keep swimming in our lake until the water's unbearably cold. My family thinks I'm crazy. But it's the deep pleasure of going slow, of feeling the water on my skin, of the way it feels velvety as I push through it, for no particular goal, just to keep afloat from our dock to Cherry Point and back. I'm thinking about a poem I found in the July/August issue of Poetry magazine. It's about fishing, but it's the same principle.
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On Poetry: Rhythm washes up in waves
Here's a question for summer: When the tide goes in and out, when the waves wash up in rhythm, why is it that most contemporary poetry doesn't have a regular rhythm, doesn't rhyme and often doesn't tell a story? What's the pleasure in that? I've been asked this question a lot.
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On Poetry: Non-Hallmark words for father
It's tempting to feel obligated to think Hallmark thoughts on Mother's Day and Father's Day, both of them seemingly designed to sell greeting cards. But lives seldom fit greeting cards.
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On Poetry: Trees at their 'Loveliest'
The cherry trees are having their short burst of glory, which always makes me think of this poem.
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On Poetry: Pausing for Mother's Day
A poem invites an intimacy of the daily sort. I think this is because a good poem, like a good mother, speaks quietly into the ear.
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On Poetry: Why Shakespeare lasts
Time for a sonnet -- one of my favorites. It's proof that the sound of language is what makes a poem.
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On Poetry: A matter of life and death
Who but Emily Dickinson would have thought to write a poem in the voice of a person who's already died, who's remembering the last thing she saw?
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On Poetry: Kenyon's timeless questions
I often read poems about war these days, maybe to figure out how to live with its horror. This poem is by Jane Kenyon, who was born in Ann Arbor and earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Michigan.
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On Poetry: Hats off to Poetry Month
I'll be offering a poem a week during April, which is National Poetry Month. This week's poem, a seemingly simple one by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, travels a long way in a short space -- from the literal hats of generations ago to present metaphorical ones.
