A line from Mary Oliver’s “Why I Wake Early” caught my ear, thanks to the prompt at Adele Kenny’s poetry blog: wake.
Not a morning person
(after M. Oliver)
even the miserable and the crotchety
must wake, however early or late,
to the sun’s relentless cheeriness
and radioactive optimism
Reading Mary Oliver again; even her prose is poetry.
Time means little in the world of poems
To be contemporary
is to rise through
the stack
of the past,
like the fire through
the mountain.
Only a heat
so deeply and intelligently
born can carry
a new idea into
the air.
– Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook, p. 12
Posted in Poetry
Tagged 30 in 30, found poetry, Mary Oliver, poetry practice, writing challenge
I found a copy of Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook at the used book store last week. I picked it up this morning and these sentences jumped off the page.
(Found poetry from p. 9)
Reblogged from the Lexington Poetry Month blog.
Beyond the margins of the self
Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem
after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river
waves. None is timeless; each arrives
in an historical context; almost
everything, in the end, passes. But the desire
to make a poem, and the world’s willingness to receive
it—indeed, the world’s need of it—
these never pass.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged found poetry, Lexington Poetry Month, LexPoMo, Mary Oliver, poetry practice
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