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Fascinating how poetry infuses Oliver's life!

Ann wrote: "Fascinating how poetry infuses Oliver's life!"

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Yes. I thought it was an interesting interview.

Thank you so much, Alias, for sharing this interview. It was a delight to read the pleasure she continues to find in poetry. I particularly identified with the following:

"BOOKS: Have your tastes in reading changed over time?

OLIVER: Not very much. The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones."

There are so many poets with various insights that keeping up with them (such as Oliver, frankly) is a challenge if i also want to hold onto the other, more established poets. But such a delightful challenge!

The Hymn of a Fat Woman
Joyce Huff

All of the saints starved themselves.
Not a single fat one.
The words “deity�� and “diet�� must have come from the same
Latin root.

Those saints must have been thin as knucklebones
or shards of stained
glass or Christ carved
on his cross.

Hard
as pew seats. Brittle
as hair shirts. Women
made from bone, like the ribs that protrude from his wasted
wooden chest. Women consumed
by fervor.

They must have been able to walk three or four abreast
down that straight and oh-so-narrow path.
They must have slipped with ease through the eye
of the needle, leaving the weighty
camels stranded at the city gate.

Within that spare city’s walls,
I do not think I would find anyone like me.

I imagine I will find my kind outside
lolling in the garden
munching on the apples.

Madrano wrote: "Thank you so much, Alias, for sharing this interview. It was a delight to read the pleasure she continues to find in poetry. I particularly identified with the following:

"BOOKS: Have your tastes ..."

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You're welcome !

khi wrote: " The Hymn of a Fat Woman
Joyce Huff

All of the saints starved themselves.
Not a single fat one.
The words “deity�� and “diet�� must have come from the same
Latin root.

Those saints must have been..."
----------------

:)

9 November

It's the birthday of the poet Anne Sexton born Anne Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts (1928). She said of her childhood: "I was locked in my room until the age of five. After that [...] at home, or away from it, people seemed out of reach. Thus I hid in fairy tales and read them daily like a prayer-book. Any book was closer than a person. I did not even like my dolls for they resembled people."

She never went to college, eloped when she was 19, and became a suburban 1950s housewife. She was 28 when she had her first nervous breakdown. After a suicide attempt, her psychiatrist advised her to try to writing poetry as therapy. She did, and the following year, she took a poetry seminar with the poet Robert Lowell, who admired her work. Within a few years of having written her first poems, she had published her work in more than 40 magazines, including Harper's and The New Yorker.

For the rest of her life, she was in and out of mental institutions, on and off psychiatric drugs, and she said that poetry was the only thing that kept her alive. She said, "My fans think I got well, but I didn't: I just became a poet."

Most critics consider her best poems to be those in her first two books, To Bedlam and Partway Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962). Her collection Live or Die (1966) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She committed suicide in 1974.

Anne Sexton said, "Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face."

***The Poetry Foundation
National broadcasts of The Writer's Almanac are supported by The Poetry Foundation, celebrating 100 years of Poetry magazine in 2012

The Complete Poems
Anne Sexton

Sexton's is an interesting life. For years i held onto a newspaper article about her and her death. Here is a link to it. Somehow i failed to notice previously that she spent some of that day with poet Maxine Kumin, working on a poem each woman had written.

Welcome Morning
by Anne Sexton

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.
All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.
So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.
The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.

Sexton suffered from severe mental illness for much of her life, her first manic episode taking place in 1954.

On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with poet Maxine Kumin to revise galleys for Sexton's manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975 (Middlebrook 396). On returning home she put on her mother's old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.[10]

In an interview over a year before her death, she explained she had written the first drafts of The Awful Rowing Toward God in twenty days with "two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital." She went on to say that she would not allow the poems to be published before her death. She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery & Crematory in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts.

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Sad. And at that time I would think not much treatment available.

If i recall correctly Sexton began writing poetry at the suggestion of her therapist. Also, she used to don that fur coat and sit in the sunshine atop fallen snow. I like that image.

15 November

It's the birthday of American poet Ted Berrigan , born in Providence, Rhode Island (1934). He served in the Korean War as a sentry, went to college at the University of Tulsa, and then went to live on the Lower East Side of New York City, where he met up with poets Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, and Dick Gallup.

In 1962, Berrigan married Sandy Alper after a courtship of only a few days, and they had a son the next year. It was around this time he started work on his innovative collection of 14-line poems called The Sonnets. He wrote the first six sonnets in one night, and then he wrote two or three per day for about three months. Some of the sonnets were made from lines of poems he or his friends had already written, some were translations of poems, some were completely new.

The Sonnets was published in 1964, and it was a big success. Berrigan later said: "When I came to New York I hadn't written anything good at all. I came to New York to become this wonderful poet [...] to find out how to work at it. That only took about a year and a half, then I wrote this major work and there I was. Just as I thought I would be, in my inane stupidity." He went on to teach and write poetry for 30 years, until his death in 1983, at the age of 48.

***The Poetry Foundation
National broadcasts of The Writer's Almanac are supported by The Poetry Foundation, celebrating 100 years of Poetry magazine in 2012

The Sonnets~Ted Berrigan

The Collected Poems~Ted Berrigan

I like poetry but sometimes poets just don't click for (or with) me. Berrigan is one. Here's a link to several of his poems in case someone here would like to see some of his works.

This is the poem i mentioned in the Favorite Quote thread. It is by Edwin Markham.


Epigrams

Preparedness

For all your days prepare,
And meet them ever alike:
When you are the anvil, bear--
When you are the hammer, Strike.

Outwitted

He drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!

The Avengers

The laws are the secret avengers,
And they rule above all lands;
They come on wool-soft sandals,
But they strike with iron hands.