April is National Poetry Month!

[cerusee]

Background: I've heard a lot, and I mean a lot of good things about Mary Oliver, so I went looking for the poems, found a website with several dozen, starting reading...a few I liked a lot, most I found fairly lacking, but when I started reading the comments posted after the poems, I discovered that every poem in the Oliver section that I really liked was actually a misattribution from another poet.

Go figure.

So, not Mary Oliver, but William Stafford.


After Arguing Against The Contention That Art Must Come From Discontent

Whispering to each handhold, "I'll be back,"
I go up the cliff in the dark. One place
I loosen a rock and listen a long time
till it hits, faint in the gulf, but the rush
of the torrent almost drowns it out, and the wind --
I almost forgot the wind: it tears at your side
or it waits and then buffets; you sag outward...

I remember they said it would be hard. I scramble
by luck into a little pocket out of
the wind and begin to beat on the stones
with my scratched numb hands, rocking back and forth
in silent laughter there in the dark--
"Made it again!" Oh how I love this climb!
-- the whispering to the stones, the drag, the weight
as your muscles crack and ease on, working
right. They are back there, discontent,
waiting to be driven forth. I pound
on the earth, riding the earth past the stars:
"Made it again! Made it again!"


Funny story: yesterday, in Archives class, I borrowed a marker during the break and scrawled, "MY LAST DUCHESS" on an unused blackboard.