Traverse City Record-Eagle Fleda Brown: On Poetry

On Poetry: Knitting, like love, has a fringe

2012-02-05T07:14:53-05:00

Even if this winter's been mild, we've had plenty of chances to appreciate our knitted scarves, shawls, and sweaters. I think the hand-knitted ones are the warmest, holding all that personal care and attention in their fibers.

On Poetry: 'Be gentle with small ... things'

2012-01-01T06:14:55-05:00

On Poetry: Advent calendars and uncertainty

2011-12-04T06:14:55-05:00

On Poetry: Poem's start-and-stop just right

2011-11-06T06:14:53-05:00

On Poetry: Sudden bolts, threshers

2011-10-02T07:14:53-04:00

On Poetry: Poem subtle in its message

2011-09-04T07:14:49-04:00

We ask a lot of our schools. We hope they'll impart not just information but something about how to live, how to be in the world in relation to others. It has been ever thus — when I was in fifth and sixth grades in a public school in Arkansas, our teacher began the day with a Christian prayer. We gathered at the lunch table for a blessing before we ate. Can you imagine that now? The lesson, if there was one, was how to be oblivious to those who don't think like us. Louise Erdrich's poem offers an example of how far we have gone sometimes, to our shame, in that direction. Erdrich is half-Chippewa, half-German-American. She's best known as a novelist, but her poems are very much worth checking out. She grew up in North Dakota, where her parents taught at a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In her poem, she invents a speaker who remembers how it was, as a Native American, to be forcibly sent away to boarding school to forget her heritage, to learn to be White.

On Poetry: We can't control the moonlight

2011-08-07T07:14:53-04:00

In little ways and in large ones, we are not in control. We can move ourselves into the moonlight, we can choose to notice it, but we can't move it. "It" — like love, or awe, or hatred — isn't a thing.

On Poetry: Summer romances, disasters

2011-07-03T07:14:53-04:00

A lot of us have had our summer romances. When I was 13, there was this guy, Lee, whose parents stayed at Ken-Thelm resort just down the lake. I was madly in love. I would paddle my canoe down his way and just circle around, hoping he'd come out. Though I probably couldn't have seen him if he did, since I refused to wear my glasses. On land, I crashed into trees for the sake of love. I started using my middle name, Sue, because Fleda was too dumb. However, after all my efforts, just as his family was packing to go home, he told me that he was in love with Judy, our next-door neighbor at the lake, because "she's such a good dresser." I couldn't argue. She was. I'll dedicate my choice of this poem to my old friend Judy. J. Allyn Rosser's sonnet — notice that it is a Shakespearean sonnet! — is about passing on a lover to someone new.

On Poetry: Lake water lapping by shore

2011-05-01T08:52:36-04:00

In May our thoughts turn toward lake water as surely as William Butler Yeats' did while walking the streets of Sligo in Ireland, hearing the sound of a nearby fountain. Yeats said that when he was young he wanted to imitate Henry David Thoreau by living on Innisfree, a small island in Lough Gill. Jerry and I have stood on the shore of Lough Gill, which, sure enough, glimmers in the morning like our own lake.
Beside our fireplace mantle, we have a small framed copy of Yeats' poem, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."

On Poetry: My National Poetry Month column

2011-04-03T07:14:49-04:00

More poetry is being written and published now than ever before — which of course means that a lot of bad poetry as well as good is out there for us to discover. That's all to the good, to my mind. History tends to forget how much bad art it takes to make a small amount of good art. Nature is wasteful.