I wrote this poem a few months into the pandemic, when I was staying alone at a cottage on Lake Ontario to visit my elderly parents—outdoors and socially-distanced. Our bodies had quickly become dangerous, and I was thinking about how everything that seemed solid felt like it was disappearing out from underneath me.
Erin Dorney on "Day 10" |
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"Marie Howe Maps a Spiritual Journey"
"In 'What the Living Do,' Howe addresses her brother as if he were present, seeming to conjure his spirit: 'Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days.' The casualness of the writing is balanced by a sense of paralyzing grief. The poem ends with Howe finding a way past confusion and disarray and arriving at a place of light....'Whether she is confronting the joys or terrors of existence,' [Stanley] Kunitz once said of his student, 'the light that falls on the page is suffused with grace and charity. In essence she is a religious poet, that rarity among writers of her generation.'"
via THE PROVINCETOWN INDEPENDENT |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Aby Kaupang on Language as Form
"Often I have thought of Bidart’s insistence on the necessary poem as clarifying my draw to poetic architecture. One night, in looking for his specific quote (for the hundredth time), I re-read his 1983 interview with Mark Halliday and was newly drawn to the part where Bidart speaks of a 'will unbroken and in stasis' that has 'learned to refuse' what the world might easily offer." |
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