revised October 2024

Pick one poem: thoughts on process, not so simple as I unthinkingly assumed-- my American shelves are all but bare...

a browning version of Walt Whitman ’55— from which I’d give you Leaf 26, urbanmusic;

not Neruda, he's too far South, and he, like Donne, writes his woman as landscape;

and not the lanky Gary Snyder, looking west from the last frontier and happily logging redwoods in his new ecology of myth.

The fallback     memory:
Lowell in tweed, taller than the lower lecture theater tiers, dim, inflection affectless, intonations tuned right down; his readings unrecalled... or loping across the San Francisco dockside tracks,
past young Sidney Goldfarb:

When I sit in the hiring hall Waiting for my number to fall dead off the board Then I really read the newspapers It wouldn't do to bring an anthology of Russian poetry Into the hiring hall of Local 6 Of the so-called International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union

Nope.
Let us try Lowell's friend, John Berryman:
‟My local library can lick your local library.”

Berryman's lines from Mistress Bradstreet I airmailed home, snowbound at Moosehead Lake:

Outside the New World winters in grand dark white air lashing high thro’ the virgin stands foxes down foxholes sigh, surely the English heart quails, stunned.

➡︎