dig

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we cheer him on,

winter softened in the tropic of his strength.

Declan Ryan

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Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “Epic” has talismanic importance to older Irish poets who took from the following lines license to write about the minutiae of their own locales:

                                        I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

To be from a small country and to write intimately about your own affairs is to risk making your poetry impenetrable, irrelevant, or both, even when writing in a global language like English. And yet to exclude your own affairs, to eliminate the parochial from your “epic” entirely risks self-censorship or a denial of one’s own truth.

An American poet can mention the film Predator, Henry Kissinger, or the town of Ferguson and an informed and cultured Irish person will know the references. Conversely, if an Irish poet chose to write about Wanderly Wagon, Pádraig Flynn, or the town of Granard even a cultured American reader, unless a specialist in Irish Studies, would be lost.

Patrick Cotter, Introduction, Poetry, September 2015

Acceptance

Yesterday it was still January and I drove home
and the roads were wet and the fields were wet
and a palette knife

had spread a slab of dark blue forestry across the hill.
A splashed white van appeared from a side road
then turned off and I drove on into the drab morning

which was mudded and plain and there was a kind of weary happiness
that nothing was trying to be anything much and nothing
was being suggested. I don’t know how else to explain

the calm of this grey wetness with hardly a glimmer of light or life,
only my car tyres swishing the lying water,
and the crows balanced and rocking on the windy lines.

Acceptance, Kerry Hardie via poets.org poem-a-day

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the interrelation between self and other things.

effort to resist dissolution of those bounds in erotic emotion.

undeniable evidence remains, in the preserved fragments of their verses, of a sensibility acutely tuned to the vulnerability of the physical body and of the emotions or spirit within it.

— Anne Carson

Today ~ I found a squirrel ~ dreaming ~ the sleep of the young and unknowing ~ I pray for a world ~ scatter-starred with that kind ~ of tenderness ~ Nothing hears me ~ Let’s pretend

[…]

I write these words ~ a lifetime away ~ at the foot of the mountains ~ another sea ~ vaster galaxy ~ primordial and without memories

Dear Sister, Emma Trelles

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All this beauty is tinder.

[…]

In Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building Production in the Vernacular City, the architect and urban planner John Chase describes LA as a city that follows no design or aesthetic ambition but insolently unspools from the desires of its people. LA has no Haussmann or Frederick Law Olmsted; it has Angelenos, and in the ‘mad and wonderful’ architecture of the city, with its stucco box houses alongside its faux Swiss chalets, its Tudor cottages, bungalows, faded pink apartment complexes and ancient auto repair shops, glittering strip malls and shabby hotels, there is a romantic stubbornness, at once dogged and extravagant, tender and brash.

[…]

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, … A fawn stumbled out of the smoke, and a horse ran back into it to nudge two other horses onward, faster.

Under the Santa Anas, Anahid Nersessian