Category Archives: poetry

I Wish

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I wish that back in high school and college, we had been assigned to read more poems like Snow at the Farm by Joyce Sutphen, and a bit less Wordsworth, Shelley, Milton, and the like. I might have found a shorter path to begin finding my own voice. Because I think poetry – modern stuff at least – is best written about the simple, but hard to speak of, ordinary moments of our lives.

 

Wishing

There is a light
beyond the window
and leaves beyond the light
and the clock pretending life
against the wall
and me in the midst of it
wishing for you

 

Hear an audio reading of this poem:

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Wishing by Kyle Kimberlin is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

I have received such gifts

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For Fathers Day, we need a beautiful poem about fatherhood. I considered sending you forth to read Roethke’s My Papa’s Waltz, but it goes without saying, don’t you think?

Instead, The Gift, by Li-Young Lee. And here’s a sip to wet your whistle:

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face

The Theme of Poetry

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The theme of poetry is death. I tell people, if you’re majoring in English, you’re majoring in death. The oldest theme in poetry is cape diem, and the reason you would carpe the diem is that you don’t have too many diems left. But poetry always looks at life through this lens of mortality. And looking at it through that lens tends to italicize life and the result provides the second greatest theme in poetry perhaps, and that’s gratitude. Gratitude for being alive.

– Billy Collins

Week Without Salvages

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A little over a week ago, I went for a walk and listened on my iPod to someone reading the last part of The Wasteland, What The Thunder Said. I thought to myself I will go home and write a poem. Something is stirring in the wind. But the stupid wind turned and blew it all away, whatever it was. I hate it when that happens.

So nothing good has been rescued from the horse latitudes this week.  I’ve been very busy in other ways, and we’ve had some good rain and a fallowing sea with fair winds will come again. Until then, here’s some great poetry.

Poor Ducks

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I should have been posting a poem every day during April, you know. And not necessarily my own, because it’s Poetry Month. But as the Bokononists say, busy busy busy.

Here’s one for today, anyway, and it’s a good one. Three Moves by John Logan. 

Then again they sway home
to dream
bright gardens of fish in the early night.

When people ask us where we get the inspiration to let language run free, it’s from reading lines like that by guys like Logan.

This poem has been paddling and honking around in the back of my mind for 25 or 30 years. It’s confessional – almost literally – and transcendent at once; visual and metaphysical and 20th century fearless.

Fifteen

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by William Stafford, read by Garrison Keillor.

http://goo.gl/hvt9B

This poem has always had a peculiar feeling for me, because I first read it when I was younger than fifteen, and many years before I discovered William Stafford for myself.

Someone – probably my parents – gave me an anthology of poems when I was maybe thirteen or fourteen. I remember it had pictures too. I didn’t even take note of the poet’s name but I remember this poem.

Years later, out of college and trying to teach myself poetry using the thinking and reading that I’d been taught to do, I found William Stafford again and learned his name. I was at one of the last readings that he gave, in the summer of his death.

But this poem – Fifteen – has never fit in my mind along with all the others Stafford wrote. Because it alone belonged to that other time; another life, before I turned fifteen.