Dear Friends,
Behold, a constellation of existential poems that, even in their uncertainty and angst, offer glimmers of hope and clarity. Isn’t that just how it goes?
There are so many brilliant lines to carry with you here, from Duffy’s “Even this early / I am full of years,” to Webster’s declaration that “sometimes / we’re the pilgrim, sometimes / we’re the site.” Please let me know which others stood out to you.
xM
P.S.
These are the last days to sign up for the CWC waitlist before we open doors on 10/1. We have a truly spectacular October lineup, with craft classes taught by award-winning translator Nikola Madzirov (“On the Translation of Silence”: a look at how the “silence” in a poem is translated across languages) and by Forward Prize-winning poet Caroline Bird ("The Dark Implications of a Silly Idea”: on surprise and swerves in poetry). As always, CWC members get access to all sessions + the usual live Office Hours and workshops with me (and 50+ hours of recordings). It’s your Netflix MFA.
✨ Doors to my online writing community, Conscious Writers Collective, open October 1. We now offer a quarterly payment plan. Writers meet five times a month for live classes taught by me, publishing experts, & some of the best writers around. The platform gives you access to 50+ hours of past classes & workshops you can watch at your own pace. The Feedback Forum allows you to regularly receive poetry feedback. Enrollment is limited to 15 new members each month. Join the waitlist here. ✨
The first stanza of All Days Lost Days hit me hard. It is the first statement in your lineup, and it felt exactly what I might say: "inexplicably / so many things have died in me". You need an awareness of aging to be struck by this. And "each tear holds a tiny hologram". Perfect to visualize and conveys so much.
I also loved the image "bare flesh of the next generation" in "Elegy". I, aging me, hide my flesh.
In Merwin's Coming to Morning, I liked the line "in which the world is made from a single star". This is a profundity I think of often.
Thank you again, Maya, for this moody mélange of poems. To your impeccably picked favorite lines from these, I’d like to add a few selections I thought were wonderful as well:
Duffy – Here are the little gravestones/where memory/stands in the wild grass
Dunmore – for the bare flesh of the next generation
Webster – And I was equal to my longing:
Merwin – and our ears/are formed of the sea as we listen
Tranströmer – till morning puts his light in the locks/and the doors of darkness open
Olzmann – this braided business almost intact saying:
Outside of this fine collection, I hope everyone here has an angst-free weekend.