I am writing this fast on the heels the tonight’s reading by Joseph Hutchinson and Lisa Zimmerman while still in the glow of it, because what a glow it is! I have just Zoomed off (or out?), silenced the voices. Yet not. They stay. My room is both quiet and full.
We owe thanks to Joseph Hutchinson, for introducing us to “rescued”
poems. If a phrase can be a neologism, then this is a great one, and I predict
its rapid entry into poetic parlance.
I am quite sure that some drafts of poems are NOT worthy of
rescue (I will spare you examples from my own bone pile!). But Hutchinson’s are VERY deserving (he made
them so) and I think they inspired all listening to peruse their sketch books for
the orphans awaiting us.
Themes of water and darkness—I share Lisa’s sentiment: these
are a few of my favorite things! Hutchinson’s
description of Yellowstone Falls took me deeply into my own late afternoon visit
followed by scuffing back in the moonless dark, a dark that was darker than any
dark. I want to write about that. Don’t
you just love how poems beget ideas for other poems?
So much more I could say about Hutchinson’s poems and his
reading tonight, but blog posts are meant to be short and this one is already
not. Go forth and read him yourself: https://www.jhwriter.com/under-the-sleeps-new-moon/
“I did not want to throw out the saints with the Catholic bath
water.” So said Lisa Zimmerman tonight in her introduction to the poems in her
new chapbook: a deliberate, meticulously researched examination of and homage to
some of the (mostly) lesser Catholic saints.
But don’t be put off by the saints part if you are not Catholic
(I am, but once removed), because really these are meditations on “the bravery
of kindness,” strong women (and the men and women they birth!), family and what
awaits us (around the corner as well as “where the sidewalk ends.”) These saints, with their magically realistic
lives, deaths and afterlives, have much to teach us, and Zimmerman illuminates
their creeds and cautions with remarkable language. Read her: https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/sainted-lisa-zimmerman/
Beth, I appreciate your appreciation! I like your line about "how poems beget other poems." They do, as paintings beget other paintings and songs beget other songs. Not that there are not great artists who come along and seem to spring from the air we breathe, but the truth is that every great artist springs from soil worked for years and years by others. Writing seems like a solitary occupation, but we're all at work toward the same goal: to say what it as like to exist on this day, in this week, this month, this year, this era. No wonder we keep discovering fine poets who were overlooked in their time but now seem to speak crucially to that time! Robert Lowell, in "The Dolphin," ends with that marvelous line: "my eyes have seen what my hand did." That clarity is all we have the right to expect....
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment, Joseph. I really like this blog to be interactive!
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