Poetry Friday: Sending you elsewhere

 I don't have a poem ready for today, but I do have this: 

Joy: Editor's Discussion, September, 2022 at the Poetry Foundation. 

• I had never read Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Renascence" before (as Shoemaker had not) and I was deeply moved (as was Shoemaker.)

• I loved learning that Ross Gay is unreachable during his office hours, which he holds in his garden. Oh, joy! The setting aside of technology. Yes. 

• And I reveled in the piece by Ada Limón (now the 24th Poet Laureate of the U.S. — huzzah!) about being alone. That short piece was written in 2008 so you'll laugh at the technology references. She wrote, "We spend so much time checking our IM, our e-mails, our texts, that we’re hardly ever alone with our own thoughts." Ah, the difference fourteen years makes. We're drowning even more, wishing that the only noises came from IM, email, texting...But the message is the same. It is good to be alone. We have to be alone sometimes if, as Limón notes, we are to think of Yeats, to write, to simply be. 

Spend a little time alone today, or spend time with your favorite Poetry Friday people. (Or spend the day alone with your Poetry Friday people?) Tabatha is hosting today, at The Opposite of Indifference. 

Poetry Friday: (Maisy and) "Song for Autumn" by Mary Oliver

It's here. 

It's autumn.

It's my favorite time of year. 

It's my favorite quote about autumn: 

"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the next thirty years?"

"Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."

                        

 ~~ The Great Gatsby

It's my favorite kitten in autumn: 

Maisy on top of the world. 

Maisy making it incredibly hard for me to get anything done. 

Maisy, with no idea why we are applauding her very existence.

It's my favorite (okay, one favorite) Mary Oliver poem about autumn: 

Song for Autumn 

by Mary Oliver 

Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now

how comfortable it will be to touch

the earth instead of the

nothingness of the air and the endless

freshets of wind? And don’t you think

the trees, especially those with

mossy hollows, are beginning to look for

the birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep

....

(Read the whole thing here, at The Poetry Foundation.) 

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It's my favorite thing to do on a Friday: 

refer you to the Poetry Friday host: 

Visit Rose at Imagine the Possibilities for this week's beauty and goodness. 

Poetry Friday: Pangur Bán (a monk and his cat, or, me and our new kitten)

We have a new kitten. I am smitten.

She is (I say with complete objectivity) perfect.

As the poet said, "Truth to tell, just being here,/Housed alone, housed together,/Adds up to its own reward." 

Pangur Bán 

By Anonymous 

Translated by Seamus Heaney 

(from a ninth-century Irish poem about a monk and his cat) 

 Pangur Bán and I at work, 

Adepts, equals, cat and clerk: 

His whole instinct is to hunt, 

Mine to free the meaning pent. 

More than loud acclaim, I love 

Books, silence, thought, my alcove. 

Happy for me, Pangur Bán 

Child-plays round some mouse’s den. 

Truth to tell, just being here, 

Housed alone, housed together, 

Adds up to its own reward: 

Concentration, stealthy art.

(Read the rest here, at the Poetry Foundation.) 

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The Poetry Friday roundup is being hosted this week 

by Carol at Beyond LiteracyLink. 

And just in case you need another dose of Maisy: