I realize that many of you regard my instincts as a writer hopelessly out of date. I admire poets who were working 50, 75, 100 years ago —and I haven’t even mentioned …
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After After Rain
Okay, my series of five items was piling Pelion on Ossa, as the guy said before Zeus took him out. I had a few other second thoughts too, so would you believe:
Night …
Twelve Words After Rain
In lieu of a composed poem, one of my mentors invited me to write down a dozen words off the top of my head. I scribbled
fawn
highway
gardenia
earthworm
relent
independence
soil
refrain
reply
repay
reverse
reform
I buried the list for a few …
Vox populi
As someone who has taken decades to find his voice, I think a lot about the word. Though its etymological origin lies in human utterance, we musicians speak of the voicing of …
Warren Zevon as poet
I recently sounded out a wise man of letters (and my friend) Jake Burnett about poetry as musical lyric, preoccupied as I have been in forecasting the headaches my poems would occasion …
Frederick Seidel, Compassion Artist?
Seidel is known for being a bit rough, for breaking poetic taboos. Yet today I’ve been looking at his 1963 poem “To My Friend Anne Hutchinson,” which is is skillful, gentle, and …
In Closing
I think a lot about the sense of closure in literature, probably because of Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967), in which he argues …
W.S. Merwin’s “Rain Travel”
Here’s a clever and beautiful poem from 1993. I’ve added line numbers for convenience.
I wake in the dark and remember
it is the morning when I must start
by myself on the journey
I …
How I Came to Cross the Jabbok
By midafternoon we’d come to the river
beyond which Esau’s henchmen lay,
The banks bright with chittering poplars
and a vista of wild olives and tulips,
pines and reeds. Gazelles nibbled
the grass while larks and finches …
The other I
I think I mentioned my Biblical work-in-progress. I’m still circling and circling like a hawk watching Jacob and the angel brawling below me, but I need to get closer in order to …
angel Autumn Journal Burnett dashes Dickinson Emily Dickinson exercises hyphens Jacob Kermode Lanier lyrics MacNeice Marianne Moore Merwin Middle East myth nature poems Oliver plays prosody punctuation rain reparations rhyme Seidel Shakespeare sonnet Springsteen Tate undead verse voice weather Zevon