I assume you’re all familiar with the Favorite Poem Project that was founded by Robert Pinsky when he was US Poet Laureate in 1997. Eighteen thousand people responded, from all across the country, and videos are available online. It’s incredibly moving to listen and watch as people read the poems and say why they chose them, and always reminds me of the place of poetry in our ongoing lives. This statement on the Project home page describes my own sense of poems: “Poetry is a vocal art, an art meant to be heard in the reader’s voice—whether actually read aloud or in the inner voice of the imagination. The experience, in both ways, is bodily. As with conversation and song and many other uses of language, understanding is rooted in sound.” Pinsky describes why he shaped the project as he did: “When you say a poem aloud by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson or Langston Hughes, or even imagine saying it aloud, your voice becomes the artist’s medium. It is a form of collaboration, or mutual possession.”
I’ve often thought about what poems I might choose to submit, and of course it’s a wide, various, fluid group. I chose two to post here, an old favorite and a newer one. I first read “To Earthward” as a teenager, then memorized it as I circled my tiny bedroom. I was just discovering the pleasures of touch, the overwhelming sensations and emotions, the intensity, but I could even then, imagine a little–thanks to the poem–what it would mean to lose them. And of course Frost was imagining the future too–he was just forty when he wrote it. I was also writing poems myself, so I noticed the beautiful rhythms and word sounds and rhymes (honeysuckle/ knuckle!) I heard the speed and lightness of the first line, and later the slowing down of “Now no joy but lacks salt”–six monosyllabic words, six stresses. I felt the poem not just in my ears, but in my whole body–and I still do.
I discovered Alice Oswald’s poems much more recently, and find them literally breathtaking–sometimes I realize I’m holding my breath as I read. Her imagery is vivid and unexpected, and in “Swan” I don’t know what I’m seeing until it’s too late, I can’t close my eyes. She’s made something horrifying and sad into something beautiful–that’s a work of art. But she shows us the beauty and sadness first, the imagined, long before she ever offers a glimpse of how the encounter began. I think almost any other poet would have begun with finding the swan and them perhaps moved to the transcendental, so it’s a moment of real genius to me that she doesn’t.
So here’s your assignment: choose a favorite (two if they’re short), post them in Comments (just click on Favorite Poems in red on the right and scroll down), along with a brief statement of why you’re choosing them, and plan to read them at this week’s Fridays at 4 (eastern time) discussion.
TO EARTHWARD
Robert Frost
Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air
That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of—was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Downhill at dusk?
I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they’re gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.
I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.
Now no joy but lacks salt,
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain
Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.
When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,
The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.
*
SWAN
Alice Oswald
A rotted swan
is hurrying away from the plane-crash mess of her wings
one here
one there
getting panicky up out of her clothes and mid-splash
looking down again at what a horrible plastic
mould of herself split-second
climbing out of her own cockpit
and lifting away again and bending back for another look thinking
strange
strange
what are those two -white clips that connected my strength
to its floatings
and lifting away again and bending back for another look
at the clean china serving-dish of a breast bone
and how thickly the symmetrical quill-points
were threaded in backwards through the leather underdress
of the heart saying
strange
strange
it’s not as if such fastenings could ever contain
the regular yearning wing-beat of my evenings
and that surely can’t be my own black feet
lying poised in their slippers
what a waste of detail
what a heaviness inside each feather
and leaving her life and all its tools
with their rusty juices trickling back to the river
she is lifting away she is taking a last look thinking
quick
quick
say something to the
frozen cloud of the head
before it thaws
whose one dead eye
is a growing cone of twilight
in the middle of winter
it is snowing there
and the bride has just set out
to walk to her wedding
but how can she reach
the little black-lit church
it is so cold
the bells like iron angels
hung from one note
keep ringing and ringing