NO APRIL FOOLING
Among many other celebrations, this also happens to be National Poetry Month.
I started writing poems about the same time as the “memoir” mentioned in last month’s blog. Eleven years old then, still at it now, often sharing at open mics that welcome spoken word along with music and comedy.
For me, writing poetry invites what’s inside of me to - manifest itself. Reading poems, or hearing them read, reaches what’s inside of me and - touches it.
Rutherford, New Jersey’s own William Carlos Williams, born in 1883, knew from high school he wanted to be a physician and a poet. He became both to the end of his life in 1963. His poems The Red Wheelbarrow and Paterson are his most widely known, but this excerpt (from his poem Asphodel, that greeny flower is a personal favorite:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack of what is found there.
The first poet whose work I came to know and love and heading into my teens was all of seventeen when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. I was six years her junior, but she served as a real role model for a lot of early imitative poems. She continued to inspire as I accepted that invitation to manifest what was inside of me, decade after decade after decade (and then some).
The poet's name was Edna Saint Vincent Millay. Wherever you choose to search, you’ll find a wealth of information, along with the wonderful - make that ‘wonder-filled’ body of work she created until her 1950 death at her home “Steepletop” in Austerlitz, New York.
I had this already famous quote of hers by heart at 11. Still do. This is how it goes:
I do believe the most of me
Floats under water; and men see
Above the wave a jagged small
Mountain of ice, and that is all.
Only the depths of other peaks
May know my substance when it speaks,
And steadfast through the grinding jam
Remain aware of what I am.
Myself, I think, shall never know
How far beneath the waves I go.
