Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I've been off Well, teaching for a week too intensively (at the
first home of Black Mountain College, in N.C.) to keep up. Love the
direction this has turned!
  

    

Thanks for the invitation, David. I'll look over my poems and see
what looks promising, and send you a couple. (I have one that I
think might have hit record potential. It begins: "The Day destroys
the night/the night destroys the day/try to run/try to hide/break on
through to the other side" . . . )
  

    

Jon asked what poetry can offer someone who feels overwhelmed by
ecological loss. 

I think there are at least two things poetry can offer when you feel
overwhelmed:

1. It can help you feel that you're not alone--that others feels as
you do. In other words, it can build solidarity and community and a
feeling of mutual support and mutual love.

2. It can remind you of the infinite beauty of nature and the power
of nature to heal you and console you even when you feel despair.

In my previous collection "In This Burning World: Poems of Love and
Apocalypse," the poem "Jerusalem Revisited" (based on William
Blake's poem "Jerusalem") puts it this way:

Jerusalem Revisited

today
just for a moment
I forgot which wars
we were fighting
who had been shot
who had been slaughtered
who was President
and how much of the arctic ice
cap had melted

on a branch above me
I saw a sparrow
who knew no history but her own
and for the space of two breaths
maybe less
I lay down my spear of burning gold
and broke my arrows of desire






3.