"I was myself the recipient of one of these [Academy of American Poets] prizes, in 1971. I felt the good things that a prize makes a young poet feel: heartened, a little more brave, confirmed in the notion that...my private scratchings and fumblings might become, if I could find ways to shape them, something that could speak to someone else," says Doty.

Mark Doty 2010

We cannot avoid missing the point of almost everything we do. But what of it? Life is not a matter of getting something out of everything. Life itself is imperfect. All created beings begin to die as soon as they begin to live, and no one expects any one of them to become absolutely perfect, still less to stay that way. Each individual thing is only a sketch of the specific perfection planned for its kind. Why should we ask for it to be anything more?


Solitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes.

Thomas Merton. No Man is an Island.

"It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something — perhaps not much, just something — of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees… and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being — not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses — but a human being, we call it poetry."

Ted Hughes, quoted in Writer's Almanac

Fine Point (12/22/08)

Why go to Sunday school, though surlily,
and not believe a bit of what was taught?
The desert shepherds in their scratchy robes
undoubtedly existed, and Israel's defeats—
the Temple in its sacredness destroyed
by Babylon and Rome. Yet Jews kept faith
and passed the prayers, the crabbed rites,
from table to table as Christians mocked.

We mocked, but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely—magnificent, that "surely"—
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.

John Updike

In the winter, in the dark hours, when others
were asleep, I found these words and put them
together by their appetites and respect for
each other. In stillness, they jostled. They traded
meanings while pretending to have only one.

William Stafford

Having Confessed by Patrick Kavanagh

Having confessed he feels
That he should go down on his knees and pray
For forgiveness for his pride, for having
Dared to view his soul from the outside.
Lie at the heart of the emotion, time
Has its own work to do. We must not anticipate
Or awaken for a moment. God cannot catch us
Unless we stay in the unconscious room
Of our hearts. We must be nothing,
Nothing that God may make us something.
We must not touch the immortal material
We must not daydream to-morrow's judgment—
God must be allowed to surprise us.
We have sinned, sinned like Lucifer
By this anticipation. Let us lie down again
Deep in anonymous humility and God
May find us worthy material for His hand.

To Seattle by train:

House forlorn,
its people fading
with its paint.

The old house -
bones picked clean
by time, wind.

Ghost towns?
Even the ghosts parched
by unending winds.

Rolling hills
grey-tan-brown after harvest -
yet every watering hole
filled with birds - in
end-of-summer contentment.

So few to bury
in the sweep of hills -
lone cemetery.

Yellow leaves, fall turning,
light up the hillside and valley
in spite of fog and rain.

Montana -
fenced buffalo roam and
antelope play.

Tall and spare,
pine hungry for sky
grows up not out.

Line of pines
edging the ridge -
first to fall?

A line of pines,
poised, waiting at the edge
like swimmers.

Frail toe-hold,
poised like swimmers,
a line of pines.

Worn dust paths -
generations of cattle
to the water hole.


At the museum, for a calligrapher:

Calm and focused,
mistakes will be fewer,
each mark true.

(Via Amtrak to Seattle, 9-08)

The understanding and appreciation for life that is present in [Paul] Zimmer’s newer poems is in its larval stage in his older poems. Instead of the comfort with mortality that we see in the last lines of a newer poem, “Desiderium” (“The unfaltering sunlit parade / Of faithful moving toward God” reminiscent of, though contrasting Sexton’s The Awful Rowing Towards God), we see a fear of death or growing old that precedes its acceptance.

Review of Passing to Sunlight Revisited by Melinda Wilson in Coldfront

Mr. [Stanley] Kunitz was regarded as a mentor to many poets, including two future poet laureates, Louise Gluck and Robert Hass, as well as Sylvia Plath.

"Essentially," he once said, "what I try to do is to help each person rediscover the poet within himself. I say 'rediscover,' because I am convinced that it is a universal human attribute to want to play with words, to beat out rhythms, to fashion images, to tell a story, to construct forms."

He added: "The key is always in his possession: what prevents him from using it is mainly inertia, the stultification of the senses as a result of our one-sided educational conditioning and the fear of being made ridiculous or ashamed by the exposure of his feelings."

(from Kunitz's obituary in the Washington Post, 2006)

The Layers, by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

"The Layers" by Stanley Kunitz from The Collected Poems. © W.W. Norton, 2000.

Stanley Kunitz said, "Poetry is inseparable from my life force, and that began very early. It was a great gift, and it has sustained me through the years, and the losses that have attended those years."

He said, "The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like the rapture breaking through on the mind."

And, "Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race."

(in Writer's Almanac, July 28, 2008)

Needless to say, when I was writing "The Tollund Man" (the first draft came swiftly) I was not thinking of Wordsworth or Hesiod or Eliot or the Muses. When I call Wordsworth an example, I just mean to cite his poem "Resolution and Independence" as an instance of something constant in the poetic life, something indeed that is indispensable to it. Call it apt admonishment, call it contact with the hiding places, call it inspiration, call it the staying power of lyric, call it the bringing of memories that are luminous into the relatively dark world, call it what you like, but be sure it is what a poet's inner faith and freedom depends upon. And the myth of his own meaningfulness among those intelligent contemporaries depends upon it also.

Seamus Heaney in the Hudson Review

"I believe there is a moral
as well as a physical grain in things,
and that our chief business is to discover
what we can of that pattern and to align ourselves with it.
...[To] search for an underlying order
even in the mess of human affairs
is less foolish than to accept chaos as the only truth."

Scott Russell Sanders, The Force of Spirit, p. 43,
"Heartwood"

"Earthy Anecdote"
by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

"Be always at war with your vices,
at peace with your neighbors,
and let each new year find you a better man."

(Ben Franklin)

"When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a comedy show, then a nation finds itself at risk." (Neil Postman)

The Education of a Poet

Her pencil poised, she's ready to create,
Then listens to her mind's perverse debate
On whether what she does serves any use;
And that is all she needs for an excuse
To spend all afternoon and half the night
Enjoying poems other people write.

--Leslie Monsour

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

("The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver, from House of Light. © Beacon Press, 1992.)

End of Summer

Full moon rising--
fall arrives to quell the heat
of August days. lkm

Verses from an early-morning walk

Chicory
and Queen Anne's lace
along the road,
dew already drying
on this hot July day.

Young rabbits
play in the weeds
along the tracks,
stems of Queen Anne's lace
and chickory above their heads.

Early morning,
calls of robin and redbird,
streak of goldfinch--
we start our day together
as I walk down the road.

Filling my nose,
the morning already hot,
scent of petunias
masking the smell of death
from a creature in the ditch.

7-9-07

lkm

7

Haiku

At the window
frozen with birdlust -
the old tomcat.

Hieroglyphs above
scratched on desert cliffs,
sneaker prints below.

First light -
wood duck on the pond
gone mad with flapping.

Sudden rain -
stuck in the car
content.

Through the trees
sun casting fish shadows
on the creek bottom.

lkm

6

Finally, brethren,
whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honest,
whatsoever things are just,
whatsoever things are pure,
whatsoever things are lovely,
whatsoever things are of good report;
if there be any virtue,
and if there be any praise,
think on these things.

Philippians 4:8

5

Continuum

Some beetle trilling
its midnight utterance.

Voice of the scarabee,
dungroller,
working survivor ...

I recall how each year
returning from voyages, flights
over sundown snowpeaks,
cities crouched over darkening lakes,
hamlets of wood and smoke,
I find
-----the same blind face upturned to the light
-----and singing
-----the one song,

-----the same weed managing
-----its brood of minute stars
-----in the cracked flagstone.

--Denise Levertov


To the Reader

As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,

and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,

and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.

--Denise Levertov

4

Look at six eggs
in a mockingbird's nest

Listen to six mockingbirds
flinging follies of O-be-joyful
Over the marshes and uplands.

Look at songs
hidden in eggs.

--Carl Sandburg

3

When I Met My Muse

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off--they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.

--William Stafford