On a happier note...

It must be that time of year when poets get confused as to whether they should be skipping through the fields like Wordsworth or sticking their heads in the oven.
Even so-called moderate ones.

But here's a much Spring-ier poem from my old friend Rumi, via Coleman Barks:
What Was Told, That

Now I know how Keats must have felt.

I was having such a rotten day, I just wrote a poem that rhymed. It didn't start out rhyming, but by the time I woke up in the middle of the night and tweaked a few lines, I realized it was well nigh a sonnet. If I can just manage to sustain this mood all weekend, I could have a terza rima. And if not, well, it's a win-win situation.

But I think I really needed this for my thesis, having chosen (what I'm coming to realize) is probably the only poetry program in the country that favors form over free verse. But it was a good program; and I probably needed that rhythm in my head. Who wants to learn stuff they already know? That's depressing enough to inspire a sonnet.

Wouldn't it be funny if I wound up a formalist, after all?
Nah, 'twas a passing fancy, I think.

Mark Strand

I saw him read at Politics & Prose last month, a tall man with a presence to match his voice, on the page and off. He signed my copy of Man and Camel.

Many of the poems he read displayed his dry, at times black, sense of humor. The following isn't one of those, though I still think it's lovely, if stark, like the landscape it describes.

My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

Plath-o-Rama

From Bookslut on Girlhood Plathophilia: Rereading Sylvia

By the way, I just realized that SP was born on the same exact day, month, and year as my father. One of those not-improbable yet nevertheless odd-seeming coincidences. But, no, my dad doesn't write poetry (that I know of.)

Quote: Katrina Vandenberg...

... the author of Atlas writes in the latest issue of Poets & Writers, in a great article about putting together a book of poems, this prosaic yet perfectly succinct summary of what a poem is:

A poem is an accumulation of different kinds of repetition. When you repeat a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, you get meter; when you repeat sounds you get alliteration, rhyme, assonance; when you repeat images, you get a motif; when you repeat an idea, a theme. A poem's natural compression heightens these sensations of repetition.