I have another blog called The Gladdest Thing where I post a poem every few days — not my own poetry, don’t worry, but the work of actual poets. As part of that, I have a subscription list where people can sign up to receive the poems via email when I post them. (Yes, I know, people could just subscribe to the RSS feed and get ‘em that way, but some people like e-mail. And I’m a people pleaser. When it suits me.)
I’ve finally gotten a WordPress subscription-list plugin working which makes it pretty easy to post and send those emails at the same time, but even so, there are days where I want to type in a poem, and others I don’t. When I’m in the mood I type in a whole bunch and save them as drafts for the days when I want to send something out, but don’t want to type it in. The whole thing is pretty therapeutic. I read the poem a few times in a book; then I type it in; then a while later I go back and re-read all the stuff I’ve typed in to see what I’m in the mood to publish. Then after I publish I read the damned thing in my email to make sure it’s right, and on the site to make sure the formatting worked.
Which is a really long-winded way of saying I read the poems I send out at least half a dozen or a dozen times before I send them, and usually a few times afterwards as well.
And lately, with all that reading, I have been loving the poetry of Mary Oliver. Again and again and again her poems jump off the page or screen and shout “this is what you must pay attention to! this is what’s important!”
In what I’ve read of her work, she focuses in on one specific natural thing - the sun, or a grasshopper, or a blade of grass, or a honey tree, or the forest - and shows how we are connected to that thing. How that thing matters, and how we can use it to examine our lives - often lives far removed from the nature she’s referencing - and how we can make them better.
I never did like English Lit and the analysis and dissection of literature and poetry, so I avoided learning how to do it well, and it’s showing. I wish I’d paid more attention now because Oliver deserves more than a fan blog (f’blog? flog? hmm) with juvenile rantings about how awesome she is to showcase, um, how awesome she is. But see for yourself. Here are a few links to poems I’ve posted recently. Then go buy her books - they will make you happy.
P.S. Happy Birthday, Grandma M. I miss you.
