School duties officially begin on Thursday, so I am looking back over the summer and running down the list of “to-dos” that I made. I was a bit ambitious, it seems, because I never did get around to learning drypoint or writing that third dissertation chapter. But I did manage to write two new chapters, get a new job, move, make several short trips to see friends, family, and the outdoors, write one new poem and a children’s book (more on this as it develops), and at least start that roll of film for my Polaroid transfers. I suppose I can’t be too hard on myself.
I did learn one more thing about poetry this summer: I don’t think I’m destined to go down in history as a poet of my generation. I’ve always known instinctively that I had more talent for recognizing and studying great poetry than writing it myself, but I still harbored faint hopes that I could speak as a Bard! Alas, the latest in a few years' worth of publication rejections has led me to a sense of peaceful resignation. Rather than pursue critical acclaim, I think my time is better served by sharing among friends and family and writing for pleasure rather than publishing.
To that end, I plan to start posting more of my own poems here for you to enjoy, contemplate, criticize, or ignore! The opening poem of my most recent short collection, Dead Letters, is below, and yes, the title inspired my blog name. I took the phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet, and the collection is spiritual in nature as it imagines the poems as lost letters between the speaker and God. I would say this style is typical of my current work, especially the use of words that resonant with dual, often opposite meanings, like "naked," implying both innocence and experience simultaneously.
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CUT
Surely the forbidden fruit
bled this same dark stain
onto Adam’s lips,
his trembling fingertips,
when first he pierced
its sacred skin.
What taste the juice that clung,
dew-like, to his naked chin?
And when it dropped, vermilion,
onto the fading grass,
thought he of me?
Was the mark left there,
like this fresh wound,
hardening into prophecy?
1 comment:
Instinctively, your ars gratia artis approach to poetry sounds like a good and valuable one. Curiously enough, it's a little similar to what Robert Southey told Charlotte Brontë in 1836:
'Write poetry for it own sake; not in a spirit of emulation, and not with a view to celebrity; the less you aim at that the more likely you will be to deserve and finally to obtain it. So written, it is wholesome both for the heart and soul; it may be made the surest means, next to religion, of soothing the mind, and elevating it. You may embody in it your best thoughts and your wisest feelings, and in so doing discipline and strengthen them.'
And this from the man whose longest-standing legacy to the world has been the story of the Three Bears...
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