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Poetry Selections for a Holiday

It’s Poetry Month, for a little while longer.  This week I was elated to hear Kay Ryan won the Pulitzer Prize for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems.  Her poems are like urgent, succinct drops of observation.  And can I just add (whisper, whisper)—understandable?  I’m not a fan of the new rage of exuberant nonsense I can’t understand.  I go away empty, despondent.  Of course, that’s just me.  If taught properly, perhaps I could learn to like it, but I don’t think so.  I’m old school that way.

Just wanted to share a couple of Ms. Ryan’s poems, so you Go.  Get.  Her.  Book.

Dew

As neatly as peas
in their green canoe,
as discretely as beads
strung in a row,
sit drops of dew
along a blade of grass.
But unattached and
subject to their weight,
they slip if they accumulate.
Down the green tongue
out of the morning sun
into the general damp,
they’re gone.

Can’t you just see the dewdrops?  You can almost taste them.

Leaving Spaces

It takes a courageous
person to leave spaces
empty.  Certainly any
artist in the Middle Ages
felt this timor, and quickly
covered space over
with griffins, sea serpents,
herbs and brilliant carpets
of flowers—things pleasant
or unpleasant, no matter.
Of course they were cowards
and patronized by cowards
who like their swards as
filled with birds as leaves.
All of them believed in
sudden edges and completely
barren patches in the mind,
and they didn’t want to
think about them all the time.

I’ve been living in the spaces for a very long time, as you can see by the title of this blog.  Thankfully, it’s becoming less tempting to try to cover them up.

One more.  I can’t resist.

Hope

What’s the use
of something
as unstable
and diffuse as hope—
the almost-twin
of making do,
the isotope
of going on:
what isn’t in
the envelope
just before
it isn’t:
the always tabled
righting of the present.

And another poet I’ve just discovered.  Can I just say I LOVE this cover?

Here’s one from Ms. Hartwig’s In Praise of the Unfinished.

Feeling the Way

The most beautiful is what is still unfinished
a sky filled with stars uncharted by astronomers
a sketch by Leonardo a song broken off from emotion
A pencil a brush suspended in the air

Aren’t they food for the soul?  Or at least a smidgen of insight for the heart?

Happiest of days to you, my dear reader.  Whatever you’re doing, may you see and feel the bounty of beauty around you.

[Post image: Tulips 1 by al71 on stock.xchng]

2 Comments


  1. Lindsey
    Apr 24, 2011

    Oh, wow – I hadn’t read any of these before, and they are just stunning. I especially love the sky full of stars as yet uncharted. So, so beautiful. Thank you! xo


    • Elissa
      Apr 24, 2011

      You’re welcome…they’re both newer discoveries for me (as compared to my favorite, Mary Oliver)…xo

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