http://www.record-eagle.com en-us Copyright CNHI All Rights Reserved. 5 Sun, 22 Nov 2009 07:05:56 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_326070550.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_326070550.html Last Thanksgiving I read this poem at a large and wonderful Thanksgiving gathering with friends in Empire. I love the poem: it feels like a blessing for those of us who aren't inclined toward typical ones. I love its crazy speed, the way the speaker sees us as half-crazed with thanking. Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:20:56 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_276192143.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_276192143.html I'm at the lake for a last few days before we have to close up for winter. There's lake life, and then there's city life (if we think of our little Traverse City as the "big city"). Both lives are, joyfully, within range for my husband and me. Which makes me think of variation and difference, and keeping both within range. Which makes me think of newspapers, the paper kind, and how they keep the variety of the world within reach. Sat, 05 Sep 2009 20:55:54 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_248205609.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_248205609.html 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. Sat, 01 Aug 2009 20:57:00 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_213205747.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_213205747.html 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. Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:25:55 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_185192742.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_185192742.html 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. Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:05:55 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_164200612.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_164200612.html 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. Sat, 23 May 2009 21:25:54 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_143212640.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_143212640.html 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. Sat, 09 May 2009 21:05:55 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_129210559.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_129210559.html 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. Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:55:00 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_115215512.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_115215512.html 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. Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:55:53 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_108205716.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_108205716.html 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. Mon, 13 Apr 2009 07:56:00 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_101215235.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_101215235.html 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. Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:00:56 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_087205055.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_087205055.html 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. Sat, 28 Feb 2009 19:00:56 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_060094722.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_060094722.html 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. Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:00:56 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_004094910.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_004094910.html 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. Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:00:56 +0000 http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_342094532.html http://www.record-eagle.com/onpoetry/local_story_342094532.html 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.