Director's Message
Poetry gives us an intimate space of connection, a heart-to-heart joining that holds us together. We seek poetry at times of joy or when terrible events ravage the world. For many, poetry is a form of prayer. As William Carlos Williams famously said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." In honor of poetry's sustenance, below are two beautiful poems written to Rita Dove's "10-Minute Spill":
In a moment
the lick then bite of a blackberry renders my mother’s voice.
In a hot valley a day spent
picking fruit from a bush big as a boat.
Her lively words, songs,
came in clear
like a needle glint in sunlight.
Heat came over
every cliff and hill,
made us all wilt, or grow.
Not one cloud to shade us
only the whir and buzz
of crickets as evening
inhaled the day.
-Katherine Crawford
Untitled
Thick blackberry clouds hang over seaside cliffs
The ocean waves crash and pull back
like a tongue frothy sea foam licking the shore
the boats in the harbor rock like cradles
they creak and moan
harmonizing with the voices of seagulls
echoing like my mother’s did
up the stairs to my teenage bedroom
-Brennen Belogorsky
We look forward to printing more responses to the prompt in upcoming newsletters!
Remembering Tony Hoagland 1953-2018
When Tony passed away last week I went to my shelf and picked up his book Donkey Gospel. In memory of Tony and other dear writers and poets who passed away this year, this poem, the last in the book, feels timely in so many ways--seasonally, politically, spiritually:
Totally
I’m raking leaves and singing in my off-key voice
a mangled version of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,”
a song I thought I hated;
that’s how it goes when our head and heart
are in different time zones—
you often don’t find out till tomorrow
what you felt today.
I know I do not understand the principles
of leaf removal; I pile them up
in glowing heaps of cadmium and orange,
but I identify so much more
with the entropic gusts of wind
that knock them all apart again.
Is it natural to be scattered?
When I look into the sky I am often dreaming
of a television program that I saw some months ago;
when I walk into a dinner party
I am thinking of the book I mean to read
when I get home – you might say
my here is disconnected from my now,
so never am I entirely anywhere,
or anyone. But I won’t speak cruelly
of myself: this dividedness is just what
makes our species great: possible for Darwin
to figure out his theory of selection
while playing five-card stud,
for surgeon Keats to find a perfect rhyme
wrist-deep in the disorder
of an open abdomen.
For example, it is autumn here.
The defoliated trees look frightened
at the edge of town,
as if the train they missed
had taken all their clothes.
The whole world in unison is turning
toward a zone of nakedness and cold.
But me, I have this strange conviction
that I am going to be born.
- Tony Hoagland
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