Here’s August! I think it’s my favorite so far this year. It was also an incredible month!
September will see revisions of one book, continued planning for the next, and at least one art or blog project.
What are your goals for September?
Day 5 of NaPoMo brings us over the reading-week hill with Mary Oliver, Rumi, and others. Here is today’s featured poem:
by Mary Oliver
When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.
Observations
This is another poem with ripe, tangible language that recalls for me “The Word Plum” by Helen Chasin. I have written about the texture of words, but this poem is perhaps the best so far for showing it: hang, brambles, black honey of summer; dark, thick paw, happy tongue. These words roll like a delicious elixir, a summer pudding, and underscore the subject of the poem itself: blackberries! When someone says “a picture is worth a thousand words” I want to show them words like this, like in “August,” that paint subjects in a whole new dimension via speech, via tongue, via the play of sound in our mouths.
Here is today’s complete reading selection. As always, favorites are starred. The first three are dark and rough, but very well done, and the Rumi somewhat religious but deliciously sage.
From The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 2: Contemporary, third edition
From Teachings of Rumi compiled by Andrew Harvey
From Rumi: Fragments, Ecstasies translated by Daniel Liebert
Stay tuned for two more days of reading and good poetry. Next week I start the transcriptions!
