Tag: poetry

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Rest in Peace Adrienne Rich: Fellow Poet, Feminist, Queer Woman, Trail-Blazer

Last week, I was about to board a plan to San Francisco when I saw Adrienne Rich’s obituary on the front page of the New York Times.

It’s hard to describe Adrienne Rich’s impact on my life with grace and brevity. That’s because my relationship to her work mirrors my relationship to the literary establishment as a whole. I first heard of her when I was a junior in high school, young poet full of promise and bereft of friends after the class of 1989 graduated and scattered off to college. A precocious freshman named Deborah, with reddish hair and presumptuous mannerisms, was shocked to learn I hadn’t already read and loved her work. What Deborah didn’t know (and neither did I) was that I’d been raised on the literary canon, comprised then as it is now almost exclusively of men. Five years later I wrote my senior thesis at Vassar on her work and the arc of her life. Seventeen years later, Margalit Fox‘s obituary said it better than I ever could.

Continue reading “Rest in Peace Adrienne Rich: Fellow Poet, Feminist, Queer Woman, Trail-Blazer”

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Empty Pond, Full Sky

what does it mean to be empty
and what does it mean to be full?

empty air
over the still glass
surface of the pond

empty belly

geese make
full-throated calls,
expectant

on a monday after the clocks change–
magic hour of daylight
missing hour of sleep

banks empty
still winter-brown

the fluttering sound
of a goose
drinking from the pond
she glides across

empty water, swirling,
then still
after her passing

the park full
of people stunned
at the way winter falls away

the playground full
of children shouting
in foreign tongues

pen drops from my hand
over the empty boulder
into the clear water
rests on the empty bottom

my womb, empty again

this moment
full of silence

this mind
full of the moment
blessed
empty

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Two February Haiku: Sunlight, Startled Deer

afternoon sun slants
shows the marsh in a new light
witch hazel, hemlock

three deer in the trees
bound away with startled tails
tiny wild island

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Tight-Drawn and Fragile

PL5 written on the wrapped-green house,
   half-built, half-lot,
down from the street from Boston’s last
         working
                farm

“Please,” utters the spirit, tight-drawn and fragile
   as you motor from one encounter to the next.
January looms in the blue-and-white sky,
chills your fingers as you dig gloves from pockets

Unaccustomed to their new location,
all your possessions cry for mercy, comfort,
      gratitude
            time a gratuity
and your check so small,
it won’t cover the bills

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Chaucer’s Virtue, Dr. White’s Bathwater

“of switch vertu engender’d is the fleur” is one of the opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Even though I haven’t read Chaucer in years, I hold his work — and the Canterbury Tales in particular — very close to my heart, in part because it was probably some of the first college-level literature I ever read. In high school, AP English was famous for a few reasons. For an aspiring writer like me, it
represented the apex of academic achievement in high school. But it was also notorious because of the woman who taught it: Dr. White. No one got to be head of my high school’s English department without earning a PhD, and the head of the English Department was usually the only Doctor in the building. Dr. White was a towering inferno of a woman, lumpy, swarthy, with a mass of greying black hair spilling down over her bona fide hunchback.

My brother and his friends told stories about her, imitating her screeching voice and her derisive comments. I was entranced. I wanted to be her — I wanted to have a doctorate in English, head up the
English department of a fairly well funded public high school, and I wanted to teach other people about Chaucer. I wanted to bathe in poetry all day.

Perhaps it’s for the best that I didn’t get my wish. It might be sour grapes, but looking back over the course of my life and talking with other poets has helped me realize something I didn’t get when I was 17: that poetry is a rare, intense, sweet thing, like chocolate. And like chocolate, I find it best served in moderation.

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How to Be Alone

A beautiful poem — visual, verbal, musical — on the virtues of solitude.

“If you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed and alone is okay.”

Watch it on Youtube