This is delightful. The "What was it..." question is teasing me with echoes I can't quite reconstruct--I thought of Robert Frost's "For Once, Then, Something," but that's not quite right. It won't surprise you that I also thought of a couple of Richard Wilbur poems. His "A Sketch" is one of my favorites (I love to describe this one to students as written in three-line stanzas rhymed abba). Your juxtaposition of organization with furrow reminds me also of some of the images in "Plain Song for Comadre." You'll understand, of course, that my comparison of your poem with others is part of the pleasure of reading for me, and not at all a suggestion that your poem is not its own lovely thing! (I, for one, would like to see you collect your recent stuff into a print version that I could have on my shelf to conveniently return to.)
Not at all! I'm going to take any comparison of my work to Wilbur's as the compliment that it is! And as you know very well, his work forms a significant part of my mind's furniture.
I've certainly thought about consolidating the last few years of work into a book, which would be called Auguries, given the number of birds that have appeared in the poems during this stretch.
This is delightful. The "What was it..." question is teasing me with echoes I can't quite reconstruct--I thought of Robert Frost's "For Once, Then, Something," but that's not quite right. It won't surprise you that I also thought of a couple of Richard Wilbur poems. His "A Sketch" is one of my favorites (I love to describe this one to students as written in three-line stanzas rhymed abba). Your juxtaposition of organization with furrow reminds me also of some of the images in "Plain Song for Comadre." You'll understand, of course, that my comparison of your poem with others is part of the pleasure of reading for me, and not at all a suggestion that your poem is not its own lovely thing! (I, for one, would like to see you collect your recent stuff into a print version that I could have on my shelf to conveniently return to.)
Not at all! I'm going to take any comparison of my work to Wilbur's as the compliment that it is! And as you know very well, his work forms a significant part of my mind's furniture.
I've certainly thought about consolidating the last few years of work into a book, which would be called Auguries, given the number of birds that have appeared in the poems during this stretch.