Happy Friday my firends. I hope you have an awesome weekend.
I came across poet, Kathryn Starbucks, this week while in search of new poems to enjoy. You know you get those moments where you just crave to curl up with a cup of tea and a great poetry book on your favourite corner of the couch. This was one of them for me.
So off I went in search and I read an interview with this wonderful lady who only started writing poetry at 60.
I think one of the things I really like about her poems that I have read is the note of accentricity and quirkiness I get.
I loved her response to an interview question from the
Poets & Writers Mag when she talks about her poetry writing:
Question:
P&W: Would you have ever written poetry if you hadn’t gone through this intense grief?
Answer:
KS: I don’t think I would have. I was driven to do it. And once I started doing it, I liked it a lot. I still like it. I just love writing poems. I love working with the words. I know nothing about how a poem is put together. I have no interest in any of that—whatever it is that is supposed to make a poem. But I know how I like to do it. It just really, really interests me, so I do it a lot.
Bio: Journalist, essayist, and editor (of the Milford, New Hampshire, weekly newspaper Cabinet), Kathryn Starbuck started writing poems in her 60s. Her first collection, Griefmania, was published in 2006. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Best American Poetry 2008.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/
Undone Song at Neap Tide
When the sun and moon were in quadrature, when
the garden had become a wilderness and the clock refused to strike
When the old year died and the sand walked into
the sea with the neap tide
When you had been too long away and your old snowblue footprints
clotted and hesitated in the clay
When the worry of this undone song unsung so long
so loud my head I went inside and under to let the flood run free
Source: Poetry (February 2005).
Convinced, 1957
At last I was convinced that giving in to their thinking represented a huge error in the evolution of my family affairs. Riven with a savage melancholy, not permitted out of the house without two minders—one armed with needle sedative, the other armed with arms—I armed myself with myself and threw off the vulgar superstition and reactionary domination that had up to then poisoned my mental library, imprisoning me, making me believe, with them, that I must have children when I knew that I must not, would not. And I did not.
Source: Poetry (January 2012).
Ideas
I was the lonely one in whom
they swarmed in the millions.
I was their creature and I
was grateful. I could sleep
when I wanted.
I lived a divided
existence in sleepdreams
that lit up a silence as dreadful
as that of the moon. I have
an overly-precise recall of
those solitary years before
I opened the curtain and drew
upon a universe of want that made
me so strong I could crack
spines of books with one hand.
Source: Poetry (March 2009).
