Fleda Brown: On Poetry
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On Poetry: A poem's public, private land
Poetry is political — sometimes overtly, but mostly not. When it's not, it's still in the business of making the private public and the public private.
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On Poetry: The 4th, return and endeavor
I started thinking about the idea of return, that we can no longer assume existence is linear. What is coming may also be going away, even at the same time.
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On Poetry: The common moment hits hard
"Was each an Eden waiting to be lost?" asks Linda Pastan in her poem. She names roses, lemons, lilacs, hemlocks, grapes as the things that make up the garden of the world, while the ice caps are melting, the water rising.
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On Poetry: Taking poems personally
I just got back from the annual Associated Writers and Writing Programs convention in Denver. I love to go — I see friends I wouldn't see otherwise, I hear lots of good poems, and I'm involved in some great conversations about poetry, both contemporary and classic.
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On Poetry: Smarter, braver with poems
Can poetry be powerful? If so, how? First let me say, there's poetry and then there's poetry. Some is all hearts and flowers, confirming our collective prejudices and making us feel nothing but self-satisfied. The other slaps us awake, lets us see with new eyes.
Continued ... - March 13, 2010
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On Poetry: Two art forms 'talk'
I walked into the sculptor Bill Allen's studio near Maple City last year and in one breath said to him, "Let's do a project together. I want to write poems that bounce off your sculptures."
Continued ... - February 13, 2010
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On Poetry: Sad valentine, still beloved
Not a terribly happy valentine! But sometimes I think the way we most appreciate the ones we love is when we are most aware of the presence of death -- ours and theirs. This poem is one of a large group of poems Tess Gallagher wrote after the death of her husband.
Continued ... - January 16, 2010
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On Poetry: Choices in the new year
If I picture this new year in the typical way, as a baby, I'm seeing that baby looking utterly baffled. Huh? What now? Within our country, we suffer with deep differences over the route we should take toward universal health care, over war or no war, over what to do about the environment, human rights, and so on.
Continued ... - December 21, 2009
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On Poetry: Beauty part of metaphor
I was walking down Front Street last December, snow coming down like a scene on a Hallmark card, clear lights sparkling on the small trees, the big tree on Cass Street all multicolored and happy, and I was thinking how we humans work to make beauty.
Continued ... - November 22, 2009
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On Poetry: A Thanksgiving blessing
Last Thanksgiving I read this poem at a large and wonderful Thanksgiving gathering with friends in Empire. I love the poem: it feels like a blessing for those of us who aren't inclined toward typical ones. I love its crazy speed, the way the speaker sees us as half-crazed with thanking.
Continued ... - October 3, 2009
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On Poetry: Papers help us grow
I'm at the lake for a last few days before we have to close up for winter. There's lake life, and then there's city life (if we think of our little Traverse City as the "big city"). Both lives are, joyfully, within range for my husband and me. Which makes me think of variation and difference, and keeping both within range. Which makes me think of newspapers, the paper kind, and how they keep the variety of the world within reach.
Continued ... - September 5, 2009
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On Poetry: Feeling from belly to teeth
I want a good poem to articulate, not to make my life simpler or easier or offer me column-width solutions. I want it to tell me the truth, to wake up my mind and my heart. This poem, by Denise Levertov, manages to make me feel.
Continued ... - August 1, 2009
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On Poetry: Growing tomatoes up north
In this poem from her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Louise Glück imagines the voice of a gardener speaking to someone who must be God. (Vespers is an early evening worship service.) I love this poem, and the book it comes from, for its unusual vision as it wrestles with complicated questions of love and responsibility.
Continued ... - July 4, 2009
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On Poetry: Summer teaches us about poems
A poem, if it's working well, if it's good poem, is able to take us inside someone else's skin so convincingly that it turns out we're not really separate from the speaker at all. It becomes our own experience. Not in the sense that we appropriate it and turn it into a poem about us.
Continued ... - June 13, 2009
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On Poetry: Parents love, wrinkle, die
This poem by William Meredith appeals to me. Meredith gets exactly to the heart of the parent/child ambiguities. He enters the mind of a child, the way we see our parents as impossibly different from us, then what it's like to see them aging, and how we feel, caught in our own baffling life.
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