Dorianne Laux, “Moon in the Window”

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

From Facts About the Moon. Laux is also the co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. On the subject of inspiration, Laux told an interviewer: “There is no one way to get into a poem. And that’s part of the excitement, that you never know what the trigger will be. And for me, much of the enjoyment of writing is the search for the exact word. I like moving through my day thinking about a line of poetry, searching for a word. Precision is as important to poets as it is to watchmakers or the builders of bridges. Each brick or board or steel rod needs to be perfect to hold the thing up.”

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15 April 2007 | poetry |

Robert Wrigley, “Review”

Impossible not to admire the stinkbug’s blundering:
sitting on the porch, I could see among the swarm flying my way
this particular one at least twenty yards or more away
before—and despite my hapless ducks and feints—
he smacked me right in the forehead and fell
exactly into the center of the book my evasive maneuvering
had caused me to forget about, so that it closed on him

and wounded him, yes, it’s true, but not before
he left in the thin of it that amazing harsh camphor
and swampy crotchland smell he is most famously known for,
which even today, some years later, still purls
from its pages, though I have not opened the book again.

From Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems. “My sense of the poem has come to be that it is a thing that emerges in the writing. It is rarely something premeditated, plotted, graphed, or outlined in advance,” Wrigley once told an interviewer. “Good poems are smart. They devise ways of allowing the reader in. They don’t answer all the questions; they pose questions. But the ones that matter most to me are the ones that allow me to come inside and see how the light shines through the windows.”

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9 April 2007 | poetry |

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