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Trying something new!
Jan. 19th, 2019 09:25 pmSo I've started something new in the last couple of months: I'm writing poetry again. Which is partially because Kath took a poetry workshop at school and was sending me her stuff, and partially because all of this is sort of beyond prose or even journaling. And then Mary Oliver died.
So......Mary Oliver was hugely formative to me as a babby poet in college; American Primitive was one of the readings in the intro level poetry writing class, and her work hit me like a thunderbolt. And then I found out we have the same birthday (same as the early 20th C poet HD, by the way, which is a lovely coincidence that I savor deeply).
I stopped writing poetry in the mid-2000s, I think, along with the rest of my writing, probably even sooner than prose, tbh. (I was in a writers group with folks who wrote prose fiction but not poetry at all, which made a big difference.) But even before Kath started sharing her work with me, Mary Oliver came back into my life, when Emi shared the classic Wild Geese, and then last year when Kath and I were looking for a title for our series, I happened to be searching for Wild Geese, and found it on a page with a bunch of her other poems, including The Journey, which ends with the line we used: the only life you could save. And it felt true to the story we were telling, and at the same time just resonated as deep as anything I've read in years.
So when she died, I decided to both break out my copy of A Poetry Handbook, which I bought years ago and never used, and to just go into nature and wander and write. Last night I went back to Tacoma (where I lived 1992-2000) and today I went out to Point Defiance, and this happened, and I'm pretty happy with it. I think I'm going to start sharing some of my poetry here, partially to get into the practice of regular blog posting, partially to get into the habit of putting my poetry out into the world, partially to push myself to write more.
( Poem under the cut )
So......Mary Oliver was hugely formative to me as a babby poet in college; American Primitive was one of the readings in the intro level poetry writing class, and her work hit me like a thunderbolt. And then I found out we have the same birthday (same as the early 20th C poet HD, by the way, which is a lovely coincidence that I savor deeply).
I stopped writing poetry in the mid-2000s, I think, along with the rest of my writing, probably even sooner than prose, tbh. (I was in a writers group with folks who wrote prose fiction but not poetry at all, which made a big difference.) But even before Kath started sharing her work with me, Mary Oliver came back into my life, when Emi shared the classic Wild Geese, and then last year when Kath and I were looking for a title for our series, I happened to be searching for Wild Geese, and found it on a page with a bunch of her other poems, including The Journey, which ends with the line we used: the only life you could save. And it felt true to the story we were telling, and at the same time just resonated as deep as anything I've read in years.
So when she died, I decided to both break out my copy of A Poetry Handbook, which I bought years ago and never used, and to just go into nature and wander and write. Last night I went back to Tacoma (where I lived 1992-2000) and today I went out to Point Defiance, and this happened, and I'm pretty happy with it. I think I'm going to start sharing some of my poetry here, partially to get into the practice of regular blog posting, partially to get into the habit of putting my poetry out into the world, partially to push myself to write more.
( Poem under the cut )
