When I select a poem for the title chapters, sometimes I already know which one I'll use. Other times I'll have a specific poet in mind. For example, with Jasper, I knew I'd be using Blake, Neruda, and especially Roethke at some point; for Edward, I knew I'd use some Dylan Thomas. For this chapter, Adrienne Rich seemed appropriate. There were actually several poems I thought would fit, and since I could only use one for the title, I thought I'd add two others I had considered. I hope you enjoy them! I doubt very many readers actually come over here to read the poetry, but for those who do, I love being able to share my love of poetry and some of my favorite poets with you!
Miracle Ice Cream by Adrienne Rich
Miracle's truck comes down the little avenue,
Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,
and, yes, you can feel happy
with one piece of your heart.
Take what's still given: in a room's rich shadow
a woman's breasts swinging lightly as she bends.
Early now the pearl of dusk dissolves.
Late, you sit weighing the evening news,
fast-food miracles, ghostly revolutions,
the rest of year heart.
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by Adrienne Rich
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.
They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.
I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control
A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths.
A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
To do something very common, in my own way.
In Those Years by Adrienne Rich
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
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Links:
I Wept Not - Chapter 18
Adrienne Rich - Wikipedia
Audio Recordings at Penn Sound
A Rich Life by Michael Klein, The Boston Phoenix Article
American Poems - Adrienne Rich
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