I love a mystery

I heard Kay Ryan read at the Library of Congress on Thursday. It was her "retirement" reading from being the poet laureate of the U.S. for the last two years. Many of the poems she read were short, humorous and accessible.


It brought to mind the complaints I've often heard about poetry being hard to understand. So I decided to google her and see if Kay had anything to say about that.

I found her under Poets.org with a link to a panel discussion called "Clarity and Obscurity in Poetry". (interesting read). Kay was one of the panelist and is quoted as saying that she is determined to send her signal as strongly and clearly as possible. I hear the voices asking..."where then is the poetry?"

Kay answered that question by reading Robert Frost's Poem "Dust of Snow". According to her, it is a poem that is quite clear on the surface, yet contains something other, a mystery. "It's clarity points to something that isn't rational."

I love a mystery---so I'm putting the poem below to read and re-read. Join me in the adventure of finding the mystery in Frost's poem.



Dust of Snow



The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree



Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

Honor your own unique thoughts and gifts. It's Spring!

Today I planted a few things in the soft, loamy earth. As I put in a few small plants, I began making a comparison with the fertile ground of the mind. I saw that as I dug, the hard crust began to give way. I pulled out some hard rocks---how like our thoughts. They can often be covered with a a crust of cliches and hardened concepts. We need to soften the mind and dig around, letting the fertile ground appear. Let fresh ideas sprout. April is here. It is poetry month.

Shakespeare's birthday is April 23rd. Honor the bard. Honor your own unique thoughts and gifts. April 29th is carry a poem in your pocket day. Carry you favorite poem and read it to yourself several times. Read it to other people you encounter that day. It even could be one that you have written. Let the ground be fertile!

Suggestion for a sleepless night

Cant' sleep? Do what a friend of mine does. Read poetry. I am not implying that poetry is so boring that it will put you to sleep. But it can be soothing, especially if read aloud---which may mean moving to another room. But the sounds and rhythms can be as calming as deep breathing. Keep an anthology by the bedside. I recommend "Americans' Favorite Poems" edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz.

Beautiful images can quiet a busy mind. Haiku is a garden of beautiful images. One that I re-read often is "The Essential Haiku" edited by Robert Hass.

Of course, there are also many poems that can sprout in your ear buds and are the next best thing to having someone read to you. And we all love being read to sleep.

We are just plain folks that love words, language, reading poetry...

Anne Bradstreet (America's first woman poet)

"These are not the poets you remember from high school who sit in lonely rooms writing maudlin words that few might hear and fewer comprehend."

Willliam Shakespeare

This is the opening paragraph of an article about protest poetry that appeared in the Style Section of "The Washington Post" on March 12th.

Geoffrey Chaucer

It may be the poets the author of this article remembers, but it is certainly not the poets that I remember that were introduced to me in high school. I am sorry that the author had such bad luck.

Emily Dickinson

The depth and power of the poetry of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Thomas, Yeats, Keats, Milton, Hopkins were not maudlin to me. The poetry of Longfellow, Frost, Browning, Emerson, Dickinson, Crane, Coleridge, Carroll to name a few, were very understandable, even to a teenager.

W.B. Yeats

 

The author goes on to say..."Poets you say...Aren't they those solitary creatures, slaves to pen and paper, pulling out strands of hair, beating on unforgiving keys of typewriters and computers, always reaching for the more perfect word."

John Keats

I suppose this is written so as to contrast dramatically with the protest poets reading an antiwar poem near the Capitol.

John Milton

I cheer them on. But please dear Post writer, we are among you in other guises---not solitary, slaves, or hair pullers.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We are just plain folks that love words, language, reading poetry and sometimes taking a stab at writing a poem.

Thoughts of and hopes for spring

It's hard not to have thoughts of and hopes for spring, even though the winds are chilly and there are blobs of dirty snow looming around us.


To bolster that hope, I bought a small bouquet of tightly closed daffodils, my favorite flower.

True to form, they opened their sunny faces and brightened my life with their utter simplicity.

Here's a poem about daffodils that is in my newly published book "At The Turquoise Table"

Photo by Russell J Smith (flickr)

Late Storm

Longing for an early spring

I sloshed through the slush

to buy

a fistful of bright, yellow

daffodils

who sit defiantly

on my table

nodding in my direction.

 

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/russelljsmith/ / CC BY 2.0

More on snow (but no more snow please)

More on snow (but no more snow please)


My friend Tom calls me after a snow fall and recites from memory the first two stanzas of James Russell Lowell's

"The First Snow Fall". He went to school in the days when it was mandatory to memorize poetry. That was quite a long time ago and he still can recite the whole poem from memory. I'm impressed.

So for your enjoyment and as a comparison to Mary Oliver's snow poem below are the first two stanzas.

Note the meter and rhyme as compared to Oliver's free verse. I think both are beautiful.



The snow has begun in the gloaming,

And busily all the night.

Had been heaping field and highway

With a silence deep and white.



Every pine and fir and hemlock

Wore ermine too dear for an earl,

And the poorest twig on the elm tree

Was ridged inch deep with pearl.

"First Snow" by Mary Oliver

From the poem "First Snow" by Mary Oliver (yes I know we're way past that)




The snow

began here,

this morning and all day

continued, its white

rhetoric everywhere

calling us back to why, how,

whence such beauty and what

the meaning; such

an oracular fever! flowing

past windows, an energy ti seemed

would never ebb, never settle.....