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Did I think it would abide as it was forever
all that time ago the turned earth in the old garden
where I stood in spring remembering spring in another place
that had ceased to exist and the dug roots kept giving up
their black tokens their coins and bone buttons and shoe nails
made by hands and bits of plates as the thin clouds
of that season slipped past gray branches on which the early
white petals were catching their light and I thought I
knew
something of age then my own age which had conveyed me
to there and the ages of the trees and the walls and houses
from before my coming and the age of the new seeds as I
set each one in the ground to begin to remember
what to become and the order in which to return
and even the other age into which I was passing
all the time while I was thinking of something different
by WS Merwin
the crows were calling around me to white air
I could hear their wings dripping and hear small birds with
lights
breaking in their tongues the cold soaked through me I
was able
after that morning to believe stories that once
would have been closed to me I saw a carriage go under
the oaks there in full day and vanish I watched animals there
I sat with friends in the shade they have all disappeared
most of the stories have to do with vanishing
by WS Merwin. final lines of the poem.
What is the special role of poetry in this condition? Poets, according to Stevens, help us live our lives, not by telling us what to think, or by comforting us. They do so by creating spaces where one individual imagination can activate another, and those imaginations can be together. Poems are imaginative structures built out of words, ones that any reader can enter. They are places of freedom, enlivenment, true communion.
A room that is like a reverie, a room truly soulful, where the stagnant atmosphere is lightly tinted with rose-colour and blue. There the soul bathes in idleness, made fragrant by regret and desire. It is a thing of twilight, bluish and roseate; a dream of delicious pleasures during an eclipse. The furniture is formed of elongated, prostrated, languishing shapes. The furniture appears to be dreaming; it seems endowed with a somnambulistic life, like vegetables or minerals. The cloth materials speak a silent language, like flowers, like skies, like setting suns.
prose poem by Charles Baudelaire
I set out to learn everything on my own so that I could become a poet. That was my goal. I didn’t know another way. For a long time—I’d say all of my twenties and much of my thirties—I was simply reading everything I could and trying to assimilate it. I visited a lot of countries, but I had no idea of the larger map. But then at some point—I had already been writing for years—things started to fall into place. I began to sense how things might fit together. I developed some theories. That’s when I decided it would be good to pay something back, to put my learning to good use. I was already a poet and critic, but I also started to reach out and become an advocate.
Poetry partly comes out of dark underground forces. Writing it is a bit like psychoanalysis. You’re supposed to go where it’s psychically troubling. It takes a certain kind of recklessness to face oneself. The more upsetting it is, the more you’re supposed to fly toward it, like a moth to the flame.
INTERVIEWER
What happens between the books? What motivates the next project? A backlog? Anxiety?
HIRSCH
Initially, there’s a terrible blankness, a void. I feel my creativity is over and try not to despair. Slowly but surely, I come back to life—at least that’s how it’s happened in the past. I find something that moves or torments me, something that’s on my mind, something unexplored. My desperation gives way to curiosity and something begins to emerge. I feel I ought to do what I can.
There were flies in every room that summer. Windows open, rolled
pages of newsprint at the ready in our grips.
excerpt from a longer poem
Tiffany’s older brother was more interesting than either Tiffany or her ruffled bedroom. When she introduced us, I felt burnished by his attention, the kind I’d already become an expert at detecting. I could feel a man’s gaze when it sharpened with interest, like the birds who flitted at the feeder in our yard could feel mine. Desire filled my bones with air. Tiffany noticed, too. Later, when she suggested we play truth or dare, she dared me to ask him to join us. Then she dared us to go in the closet. There he kissed me, probing the inside of my mouth with his tongue. As the dresses shifted on their hangers in the dark, I recognized the mix of fear and excitement that fizzed in me. The familiar sense, when he touched me, that I no longer existed. Not girl but vapor. My body a thing in his hands, my mind a balloon bumping the closet ceiling.
I was very low-key and quiet, but I was developing a strength inside. At parties, I wasn’t one of those people who could work a room. I’d be over in the corner by the bookshelf, but I was tuning my ears, my literary ears. I would spend a lot of time working on my writing, and that gave me a quiet confidence. I wasn’t distracted. I am not easily distracted. Eyes on the prize.
INTERVIEWER
What was the prize?
PARKS
Ha! Oh, that’s a good question. I remember one day I was sitting at my desk in my college dorm doing an assignment. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and my desk faced a window and the light was coming in just so, and I was typing, writing a story, trying to figure out what it was about, and all of a sudden it was as if the room was populated by people and all I had to do was listen up and write down what they were saying. I felt like I was in the river, that big river, and I’m in the flow of the stream. After that, the act of writing, the prize, became the chasing of that experience.
So the prize is just the joy of writing, hearing the sounds, hearing those voices. Just being in that river, with the Spirit, having your veins hit the Vein. When these veins in my arm intersect with the Great River and the divining rod goes bzzz. You can feel that thrum. And to come back to it again and again and know that it’s always there and if you work for it, it’s there. The work is the prize.