A Post of Posts

I have only one day left on Harriet (though they have asked we who are leaving to keep posting occasionally, and I will look forward to that). I’ve been rationing posts, but I’ve nearly run out. There were a lot gestating. One about food poetry. One about finishing the ms. of a book that includes pretty much everything I’ve ever learned about how to write poetry, and that strange tome-like closure. One about how learning Anglo-Saxon changed my life long ago. One called “What I Have Learned from Susun Weed” about my time with this herbalist, and the amazing things she teaches, and a related one called “Sprouts and Murmurs” about gardening and how I was bitching at the mint for spreading so much when I realized it was spreading to be generous and it wanted me to cut a huge bunch of it down and make delicious tea out of it which I did, and there was an insight about writing poetry there. One shouting out to some of my favorite earlier Harriet posts, such as Patricia Smith’s about “MFA Girl” or A.E. Stallings’ farewell post, about the blog as a pet.

One about the challenge and delight of writing poems celebrating my husband and particularly his body without objectifying him, and whether or not objectification is such a bad thing, and how I feel about the plethora of poems by men that mention women in passing as if it is inadvertent. One (related?) about how I can’t figure out how to write about children once they can talk, so whenever mine are at one of my readings, I keep reading poems about when they were nursing infants ( I spent, I recently calculated, four years nursing the two of them, and it made for some good poetry-writing time).

One about two talented and interesting young poets from UT Austin I met at the West Chester Poetry Conference, Jill Essbaum and Jessica Piazza, who are excited about rhyme and meter, respectively, and in new ways. One in profound appreciation of Edmund Spenser. One about rapturous contemporary poets such as Margo Berdeshevsky and Oleana Kalytiak Davis, and their roots and branches. One about why there is so much wonderful modern Greek poetry. One called “Flowers for Algernon,” that began with an anecdote about Charles Bernstein and myself both owning the complete Swinburne, an anecdote posted for five minutes on a thread here before I took it down, so that I think only Don Share saw it.

One about the experience of putting together the Multiformalisms anthology I recently edited with Susan Schultz and how the formalism/language poetry are not at all the opposed forces people imagine they are but are practically in cahoots. One about lyric, tracing the contrast between the historical, contextualized attitude of scholars like Virginia Jackson, author of a great book Don recommended to me called Dickinson’s Misery, with Jonathan Culler’s call for a renewed appreciation for pure lyric in an essay in a recent PMLA.

One about Patricia Monaghan’s descriptions of the role of the bard in the Celtic tradition. One about our convention of writing from left to right and up to down and what that says and does about poetry. One about Japanese languge and metaphor, and one about Japanese language and dactyls. One about my visit to Robert Bly’s Great Mother poetry conference and how the cult of personality affects poetry. One about epic, from the Kalevala to Notley. One about Donald Green, who sold me a handwritten book of his poetry from a card table on lower Fifth Avenue as I walked home from an Academy of American Poets event (I have spoken about this for a podcast about Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, here).

One called “Time and Detail” about home decorating and poetry, how in each of them, detail is the trace both of love and of time spent. One about amphibrachs, following up on an earlier essay. One about how I adored translating Louise Labe’s poetry but could not make myself translate the women troubadours. One about the year I spent reading versification texts and what weird books they are. One comparing koans and kennings. One about the meaning of "craft."

One on the tragedy of the ambitious Renaissance poet Amelia Lanier, who was only brought to light in the 1970s because someone thought she was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, and how immensely productive she was only during the one brief period when she had a (female) patron. One about verse drama and opera.

There are posts for summer solstice or Beltane, or both, and one called “On Being a Holy Fool: Good Fences” about how boundaries in poetry and life encourage rhapsody. And there’s one on how blogging at Harriet has been so enjoyable, with a tribute to the energy and erudition of the commenters and a gratitude for how this site has provided such a safe and exciting place to change and grow as a poet. But this is that post. Thank you.

And this is also a promised post about some wonderful books of poetry in translation that have crossed my desk recently—Fady Jouhah’s translation from the Arabic of the great Mahmoud Darwish; Susan Stewart’s translation from the Italian of Alda Merini; Juri Talvet and H.L. Hix’s translation of the most important poet in Estonian, the nineteenth-century poet Juhan Liiv, who wrote:

HOME
What made me glad at home,
What made me sad at home:
I don’t know, I don’t understand—
My mother loved me.

What made me glad at home,
What made me sad at home,
Made me sad, made me glad:
My mother loved me.