Poets tell us we don’t have to be good
Wild Geese You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell …
Icarus just keeps falling toward us
After I posted William Carlos Williams’ Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, several people emailed me another beautiful poem about Icarus, one I didn’t know – thank you, Sally and Sebastian. It reminded me of other poems about that same Breughel painting – I have a file of 50 or …
Poets show us what kindness is
My friend and neighbor, Catherine (or, as Tess calls her, "Sweet, Sweet Tina") sent this gorgeous poem by Naomi Shihab Nye (above), for all of us to think about and heal with. Kindness Before you know what kindness really isyou must lose things,feel the future dissolve in a momentlike salt …
Listen to the found music
“They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But man, there’s no boundary line to art.” – Charlie Parker Oh, my. Oh, my. Sometimes reading the Sunday newspapers is a pedestrian affair, except – of course – for that occasional heart-stopping moment when you think you actually know the …
Poets teach us about being lost
Some time ago my friend Bob Van Hook sent me a poem written by a man who began losing his grip on memory a few years ago when he was 50 years old. I wrote about it earlier, and revisited it this morning as I was thinking about poetry for …
Poetry outlasts us
Profile of the Night Heron In the Brooklyn Botanic Garden the night heron is on his branch of his tree, bluemoon curve of his body riding lowabove the pond, leaves dripping into waterbeneath him, green and loose as fingers.On the far shore, the ibis is whereI left him last time, …
Poets remind us that not everything is lost
Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, Please come to the gate immediately. Well — one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An …
Come to a unique Institute
I’ve taught each summer for the past ten years at a unique and wonderful Institute in Portland, Oregon. Faculty and participants arrive from around the globe to create a fascinating mix of people, ideas, and passions for three weeks each summer. People come for 1, 2, or all 3 weeks …
Sebastian drops in
And now, something from my writing teacher, the significant Sebastian Matthews, from his recent book of poetry, We Generous. It was the word "recognition" that got me, in many ways. Ancestor Bears have been following me around again. I saw one the other day, across the road, snuffling about in …
Icarus is falling into our poetry party
This is one of my favorite poems, ever, ever. I collect poems about pieces of art (representing in linear and sequential language the spatial experience of a painting), in case you have a few cluttering your desk and want to send them my way. Poets are in the business of …
