What We’re Drawn To
Sunday, 6 January 2013
We gravitate toward poetry that:
- creates an integrated whole of language, form, and meaning
- accompanies a reader by being an expert guide to its own terrain
- works by showing
- is efficient and clear, even when complex
- moves with sure momentum and a sense of trajectory
- is alive to and interested in its own relationship to language
- is aware of the complexities in our relationship to, in, and apart from nature
- sees into, explores, plumbs, illuminates, and situates being human
- connects, reveals, surprises
and
- makes us say “yes.”
When the three of us began to discuss Heron Tree, each of us made a packet of poems for the other two to read—just to give one another a sense of some poems that have stayed with us. Here’s what we included. (We’ve added links when it was clear that the poem has been made available online with permission of the author or publisher.)
Quan Barry, “IX: Napalm,” from “Child of the Enemy”
Frank Bidart, “The Second Hour of the Night”
Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” link
Traci Brimhall, “Aubade with a Broken Neck” link
Lucie Brock-Broido, “Also None Among Us Has Seen God”
Deborah Burnham, “When the Unimaginable Becomes Easy” link
e. e. cummings, “(me up at does)”
Mary Di Lucia, “Beauty Russe” link
H. D., “Helen” link
Carol Ann Duffy, “Little Red-Cap”
Mark Halliday, “Green Canoe” link
Thomas Hardy, “Neutral Tones” link
Seamus Heaney, “Alphabets”
A. E. Housman, “On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble” link
Li-Young Lee, “Persimmons” link
Maurice Manning, “Seven Chimeras”
Heather McHugh, “Etymological Dirge” link
Pablo Neruda, “Sonnet XVII,” translated by Stephen Mitchell
Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods” link
Sylvia Plath, “Wintering”
Anne Sexton, “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife” link
Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” link
Mark Strand, “Eating Poetry” link
Dylan Thomas, “The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” link
David Wagoner, “Young Girl with a Pitcher Full of Water”
Richard Wilbur, “The Pardon”
Charles Wright, “1975″
James Wright, “A Blessing” link