After an argument — over the phone, at dinner — with my youngest daughter (I am supposed to be on a getaway with my husband), I spent a sleepless night. This morning when writing in my journal didn’t resolve all my angst, I went on-line and looked up articles on how to fight fair with […]
At church a few weeks ago, my pastor asked if anyone knew who Saint Hildegard of Bingen was. He then rattled through a few more saints, before landing on the object of his homily. But I wanted to stop with Hildegard, a name I hadn’t heard since graduate school. Then, this morning, looking through a […]
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. […]