POETRY REVIEWS
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I have always thought of Denise Levertov as intimidating. Looking back at a volume of her poetry I am not completely sure why that is. At first glance, she does not seem anymore or less accessible than a dozen other poets I can think of. And yet she does intimidate. Theology and philosophy are constant Read more
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Robert Frost is the most American of all American poets. He is American in subject, sound, and sensibility. It is his great strength and his greatest weakness. While Whitman’s propheticness transcended his American-ness, Frost can make no such claim to a transcendent universality. In the end he remains Poet Americanus. That is what makes this volume of essays Read more
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We inherit from our parents much that flows beneath the surface of our immediate awareness: temperment, personality, ways of looking at and moving through the world. My mother watched virtually no television and only occasionally went to movies or watched them on tv. One movie that she did love though was Doctor Zhivago. She also loved Read more
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More than any poet, I associate Auden with mountains because that is where I first seriously read him. I carried a volume of his selected poems into the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness when I worked trail crew there for the United States Forest Service during summers in the early 1980s. In the evenings, after everyone else went Read more
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A number of years ago, more years ago than I care to admit, I spent some time reading Emerson’s poetry. My plan at that time was to work systematically through the American poets: Emerson to Whitman to Dickinson to Longfellow and so on. I had already done a similar thing with Irish Poets and thought Read more
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Years ago I remember reading that Yeats would constantly re-write and re-work even his most famous published poems. At the time I read that, it sounded like the most insane thing I had ever heard. Why go to all the work to make a poem, to get it right, have it set into type and Read more
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Today’s poem comes from Ted Kooser’s enjoyable little volume, Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison. The idea behind Winter Morning Walk is a simple one: a poetic journal of Kooser’s morning walks with his dog around his Nebraska home. The poems and the book are dedicated to poet/writer Jim Harrison. Each poem in the volume Read more
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When I read a poem, I always do it with a pencil or pen in hand. I have a pencil in my hand to underline and mark the lines I like best, the ones that stop me in my tracks, the ones I find myself repeating over and over to myself.. Reading poetry is not Read more
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Today is post number 100 here at ClimbingSky. Since re-starting ClimbingSky, I have missed posting only once. And that was by accident. I actually had a post for that day and had scheduled it in advance to publish. But somehow, I had set it to publish in 2025 and not 2024. Oh well. As we Read more
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My recent post of Marianne Moore’s poem, “Baseball and Writing,” got me thinking more about Moore and one of my other great loves, poetry. If you approach Marianne Moore the same way as you approach most poets you will be quickly frustrated. Her poetry is more difficult, confounding, and requires more work than that of Read more
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