Elizabeth Bishop is one of my favorite poets. This poem is one I would like to memorize. Do I have the cheek to use it as a model? We can notice that it is a villanelle (nineteen lines; five tercets followed by a quatrain; full rhymes, and a repeated, or almost repeated line that shimmies […]
I awakened late to the work of the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. I wasn’t aware of his impressive body of work until 2011, when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I didn’t buy a book of his work until recently, when Ted Kooser told me to. I have been reading him greedily ever since. […]
Beginning tomorrow I expect to have a bit more time for this project. Today, I thought I’d share a kind of smallish poem that, nevertheless, has stuck in my head. I think it might be the truck, “piled deep in cut wood,” that makes me come back to this poem by Jane Hirshfield. I like […]
(For text, click on this link: Digging by Seamus Heaney : The Poetry Foundation.) Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was an international treasure, a native of Ireland, and a longtime professor at Harvard. His poem, “Digging,” contrasts his own work of writing, with his father’s manual labor. I thought it would be a nice follow-up to Grace Paley’s, […]