Tag: illness
A mouth of purple crocus
One of the first sonnets I wrote, as an undergraduate, contained the lines: “A mouth of purple crocus opens through/ the snow, wild to speak the store beneath. / It carries coin.” I don’t remember the rest, although the poem is probably in a…
Stupid human bodies
Look at the god, good-looking, how he looks at the ground, willing it real, willing himself to love where he hardly lives, in his stupid human body, an always ailing thing. The good editors at SWWIM published my poem “Energize” this week and I’ve…
As if suspense were a permanent state
Poetry isn’t generally associated with suspense. It seems like an art of uncertainty–and a consolation for that uncertainty. Yet I find myself more and more convinced that poetry’s fragmentariness needs to be anchored by story (earlier post related to this idea here). I’m also…
Stealing the scholars’ wi-fi
The still eye of November’s hurricane was, improbably, a modernism conference in Boston. I scudded in a day late, only half an hour before my first meeting. I was recovering from illness, and my son and husband were sick, and I’d packed badly, especially…
