Practice

Writing poetry and being alone not only require practice, they also require that certain willing suspension of disbelief: Fictions have to be accepted for what they are. Writers of all ilks struggle with both--writing poetry requires such precision that it is easily abandoned, while solitude requires confrontations with demons and angels alike.

Being alone is the easier of the two when one gets beyond the initial realization that nobody's around to help. Writing poetry? One of the hardest things to do well. I have known many very good poets, and I continue to admire how they can be so precise, how their works can be multi-level structures built in just the right way.

And I am always looking for new poets, though this task is not easy. Visiting City Lights and Green Apple Books in San Francisco can be of great use, but I think I am now a greater fan of Powell's Books in Portland, where stacks and stacks of new and old collections of poetry are waiting for good homes. On my recent trip to the bookstore I selected two books: Ted Kooser's collected poems Flying at Night, and W.S Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius. Both have remained in the darkness of my knapsack for a few days. Merwin is less direct and often challenging; Kooser uses language accessible to anyone. Reading from Merwin's book, I am reminded of reading Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Morrison's Beloved--books that require a suspension of disbelief and a particular relaxation of the mind to be enjoyed.

Here's one from Merwin:

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

And one from Kooser:

Advice

We go out of our way to get home,
getting lost in a rack of old clothing,
fainting in stairwells,
our pulses fluttering like moths.
We will always be
leaving our loves like old stoves
in abandoned apartments. Early in life
there are signals of how it will be--
we throw up the window one spring
and the window weights break from their ropes
and fall deep in the wall.

Of course, I'm no literary critic, and I don't know enough about poetry to discuss either of these intelligently (Shawn at These Rivers is one to follow, however). It's just nice to once again find poetry that I think is "good."