Posts Tagged ‘poetry appreciation’
Cindy on March 22nd, 2010
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.” ~Carl Sandburg
Amazing, isn’t it — how small things can hold so much? With the precision of a haiku poet, Jane Kenyon delivers a heart-load of emotion in this short but powerful poem. Anyone who loves the domestic arts will fall in love with Kenyon’s poetry. She had a gift for revealing the sacred in the mundane, reminding us that even the most ordinary objects we own can represent a wealth of memories, stories, and lessons. –CL
What Came to Me
By Jane Kenyon
I took the last
dusty piece of china
out of the barrel.
It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on the porcelain lip.
I grieved for you then
as I never had before.
--Reprinted from Jane Kenyon Collected Poems; Graywolf Press; 2005–
– Kitchen photo by Cindy La Ferle –
This post is part of a weekly poetry appreciation series. Want more? Check out Poems to Inspire in the CATEGORIES column at right.
Cindy on March 14th, 2010
Let us hear your faint vibrato and absorb
what is invisible, wild and nearly gone.” — Terry Blackhawk
Every time I read “Calling the Owl,” I can picture the poet standing still in a snowy meadow just before dawn, listening for that which is “wild and nearly gone.”
Terry Blackhawk is an acclaimed Michigan poet, so I’m especially proud to introduce her to readers who haven’t met her yet. She’s the founder and director of Detroit’s InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a poets-in-schools program serving over 5,000 students per year. Terry began teaching English in 1968 after graduating from Antioch College. As Terry explains it, she “took up writing poetry” when she was already teaching it to her students.
“I thought, ‘If I’m asking them to do this, I should have the same experience myself,’ ” she says. “I fell in love with it. I became a poet. It’s who I am.”
Poets, novelists, and essayists are often drawn to the unfettered beauty of nature and wildlife. Yet most of our work is carefully shaped, polished, and edited before it gets published. (This might be one reason we’re intrigued by things that cannot be captured or tamed — or face extinction?) If you could write a poem or a tribute to something in nature, what would you honor or explore? — Cindy La Ferle
CALLING THE OWL
By Terry Blackhawk
This time the owl eludes us
where we stand trying to call him in
with his own voice,
which we’ve captured on tape
to release to the predawn woods.
Press a button. The air flutters,
rushing from our black box
what is hidden from us –
wing-like quaverings –
soft bursts of song.
If light mutes him, shadows offer hope,
and we listen so intently into them
the snowy meadow
suddenly seems wider, brighter
with news from beyond its perimeter.
Don’t lift, I almost pray,
don’t disappear.
Day will break soon enough.
Let us hear your faint vibrato and absorb
what is invisible, wild and nearly gone.
Mist thickens the silence, promises
patience, echo, sound not sight.
I will let that fluty tremolo find,
fill me, give voice
to emptiness. I hold my breath to sustain
the long vowel of night.
– Reprinted from Body & Field; Michigan State University Press; 1999 –
This post is part of a weekly poetry appreciation series. Want more? Please click on the Poems to inspire section in the CATEGORIES column at right.
–Photo by Cindy La Ferle–
Cindy on March 1st, 2010
I have been dissolved and shaken / Worn other people’s faces” — May Sarton
My early introduction to May Sarton‘s work was through her diary, Journal of a Solitude. I was new to personal writing at the time, and I admired how Sarton gracefully shared her private and public worlds — her beloved garden; domestic life in New Hampshire; her conflicting needs for solitude and companionship. Reading more of her work over the years, I knew I’d found a kindred spirit.
“Now I Become Myself” first struck me as a song of elder wisdom, a declaration of authentic power. Feeling her “own weight and density,” the poet has outgrown the petty insecurities of youth — including its sense of urgency. Yet the poem speaks to readers of all ages. I gave it to a friend on her 70th birthday and was thrilled to learn it is now one of her favorites. My friend was especially moved by the line, “Now there is time and Time is young.” Which lines speak to you? –CL
Now I Become Myself
By May Sarton
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before –”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
– Reprinted from Selected Poems of May Sarton edited by Serena Sue Hilsinger and Lois Brynes; W.W. Norton & Company; 1978–
–Top photo: Detail from “Book of Shadows,” an altered book, by Cindy La Ferle –
This post is part of a weekly poetry appreciation series. To read more, please click on Poems to inspire in the CATEGORIES column at right. As always, I welcome your recommendations, too.
Cindy on February 19th, 2010
Make music of what you can.” — Charles Rafferty
I always knew I wanted to be a writer. When I was a kid, I perched in the gnarly apple tree in my backyard and scribbled my own adventures in a ruled notebook. In college I majored in English and journalism, but it took years before I found the courage (not to mention the income) I needed to begin a real writing career.
The long path that led me here was marked with detours and littered with excuses. The poem below is the wake-up call I needed 25 years ago — but Charles Rafferty hadn’t written it yet. Today I keep it in my back pocket and read it whenever I need a creative kick in the pants.
What dream would you launch if you had all the time in the world? Where would you travel if you knew the road was wide open? What’s fueling your hesitation? –CL
Against Hesitation
By Charles Rafferty
If you stare at it long enough
the mountain becomes unclimbable.
Tally it up. How much time have you spent
waiting for the soup to cool?
Icicles hang from January gutters
only as long as they can. Fingers pause
above piano keys for the chord
that will not form. Slam them down
I say. Make music of what you can.
Some people stop at the wrong corner
and waste a dozen years hoping
for directions. I can’t be them.
Tell every girl I’ve ever known
I’m coming to break her door down,
that my teeth will clench
the simple flower I only knew
not to give … Ah, how long did I stand
beneath the eaves believing the storm
would stop? It never did.
And there is lightning in me still.
Reprinted from A Less Fabulous Infinity, by Charles Rafferty (Louisiana Literature Press; 2006)
–Photo: detail from a mixed-media collage by Cindy La Ferle –
This post is part of a weekly series of poetry appreciation. To read more, please click on âPoems to inspireâ in the CATEGORIES column at right. I welcome your recommendations, too.
Cindy on February 11th, 2010
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs” — Rabindranath Tagore
Valentine’s Day is coming, and I’ll be the first to admit it can be a guilt-inducing Hallmark holiday. As hard as I try to avoid playing the sentimental fool, lately I’ve been jumping at any chance to celebrate the people I cherish. I’ve lost a few in recent years — so I’m burying old grudges and trying not to leave any of my love unsaid.
Reading Tagore‘s “Unending Love” for the first time, I knew it was the perfect poem to give my husband, whose birthday falls on Valentine’s Day. Doug and I met in art class in ninth grade, and immediately felt as if we’d been best friends for ages. We married several years later, after college, and we’ll gratefully celebrate our 30th anniversary this year.
This poem was Audrey Hepburn’s favorite, and if you click here, you’ll hear a reading dedicated to her by Gregory Peck. Love to all! – CL
Unending Love
By Rabindranath Tagore
(Translated by William Radice)
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
the same distressful tears of farewell –
Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.
Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.
–Reprinted from Selected Poems, by Rabindranath Tagore (with an introduction by William Radice); Penguin Classics; 2005 –
– Photo: detail from a collage by Cindy La Ferle –
