Stanley Kunitz

Today I give you what is perhaps my favorite poem by my favorite poet. Stanley Kunitz lived to a hundred, and left a legacy of beautiful poems that will inspire for hundreds of years to come. I've read this poem maybe 800 times in my life, and I always discover something new with each reading.

The Round

by Stanley Kunitz

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.

So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
"Light splashed . . ."

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.

Eliza Griswold

I don't know much about this poet, but I read this poem in The New Yorker about three years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. I just think it's complete perfection. I hope you enjoy it as well.

Tigers

by Eliza Griswold

What are we now but voices
who promise each other
a life neither one can deliver
not for lack of wanting
but wanting can't make it so.
We hang from a vine
at the cliff's edge.
There are tigers above
and below. Let us love
one another and let go.

And We're Done

Glad MSNBC had a good laugh this morning at the expense of this transgendered pregnant guy. I'm certainly not condoning the fact that this couple has made a media spectacle of themselves, and that by doing so, they have freely opened themselves up to public ridicule. But it's a cheap shot, and the transgendered kid who's sitting at home watching three journalists get a hearty laugh over one person's apparently successful transgender journey... Scarborough's son has Asperger's. Anyone got a good joke about those freaks??

Gerald Stern

I've had the pleasure of seeing Gerald Stern at several poetry readings in the last few years. A major staple of the New York poetry world, this 82 year old is not just a great reader, but a powerful writer as well.

I Remember Galileo

by Gerald Stern

I remember Galileo describing the mind
as a piece of paper blown around by the wind,
and I loved the sight of it sticking to a tree,
or jumping into the backseat of a car,
and for years I watched paper leap through my cities;
but yesterday I saw the mind was a squirrel caught crossing
Route 80 between the wheels of a giant truck,
dancing back and forth like a thin leaf,
or a frightened string, for only two seconds living
on the white concrete before he got away,
his life shortened by all that terror, his head
jerking, his yellow teeth ground down to dust.

It was the speed of the squirrel and his lowness to the ground,
his great purpose and the alertness of his dancing,
that showed me the difference between him and paper.
Paper will do in theory, when there is time
to sit back in a metal chair and study shadows;
but for this life I need a squirrel,
his clawed feet spread, his whole soul quivering,
the loud noise shaking him from head to tail.
O philosophical mind, O mind of paper, I need a squirrel
finishing his wild dash across the highway,
rushing up his green ungoverned hillside.

Natasha Trethewey

Ms. Trethewey is the most recent American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize for her collection Native Guard. Of the poems in that collection, this is my favorite. Read it, then read it again, then once more for good measure. Or you can listen to Trethewey read it herself.

Theories of Space and Time

by Natasha Trethewey

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return

Hitchens on Hillary

A powerful argument against Senator Clinton.

"I remember disembarking at the Sarajevo airport in the summer of 1992 after an agonizing flight on a U.N. relief plane that had had to "corkscrew" its downward approach in order to avoid Serbian flak and ground fire. As I hunched over to scuttle the distance to the terminal, a mortar shell fell as close to me as I ever want any mortar shell to fall. The vicious noise it made is with me still. And so is the shock I felt at seeing a civilized and multicultural European city bombarded round the clock by an ethno-religious militia under the command of fascistic barbarians... I can tell you for an absolute certainty that it would be quite impossible to imagine that one had undergone that experience at the airport if one actually had not. Yet Sen. Clinton, given repeated chances to modify her absurd claim to have operated under fire while in the company of her then-16-year-old daughter and a USO entertainment troupe, kept up a stone-faced and self-loving insistence that, yes, she had exposed herself to sniper fire... Let the memory of the truth, and the exposure of the lie, at least make us resolve that no Clinton ever sees the inside of the White House again."
-Christopher Hitchens, Slate

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poetry month is here, my friends! Spring is here! Jhumpa Lahiri's new book is here! Love may be in the air, but love of literature is even more pungent.

In honor of all this joy, I will be celebrating some of my favorite poets and poems. And to begin, here is a sonnet by the incomparable Edna St. Vincent Millay (Learn more about her here). I hold her very dear to my heart. Of all her poems- and there are many to treasure- it is her sonnets for which she is best remembered, in part because they are so masterful.

Millay was usually vigilant about meter, but here she veers off at times, as some lines are 11 syllables and some are ten. Because she strictly adhered to the norms of iambic pentameter, what do you, my fair readers, make of her choice here not to (and of course, it is a choice)? I hope we can engage in a dialogue about this and other poems in the weeks to come. Enjoy!

Love is Not All

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.