“There are two ways they go together. A native New Yorker, she was at the first Earth Day in 1970. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel, The Writing of “Silent Spring”: Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to Speak Inconvenient Truth to Power, Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers, A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s Rare Conversation on Forgiveness and the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility, The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease, Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate, Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Famous Writers' Sleep Habits vs.
So slight a thing? would you hear it as a silence? Your support really matters.
You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7. You need to enable JavaScript to use SoundCloud. “Ledger” includes her poem “On the Fifth Day,” a powerful protest against the current administration’s silencing of science and quashing of truth that she read at 2017’s March for Science on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., fittingly on Earth Day, that attracted about 50,000 protesters.
Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. Understanding the wellspring of magic that grants the poetic form its power can only be done, must only be done, by plumbing the deepest groundwater from which all great art springs and tracing the rivulets that slake the most eternal thirsts of the human spirit. If ever there was a collection of poems that speak to this moment — of a pandemic, of sheltering in place, of social distancing when we are desperately in need of connection, of the loss of anything that feels “normal” — it is “Ledger,” the latest book of poetry by Mill Valley’s Jane Hirshfield. A thing that fills the blood, and If you find any joy and solace in this labor of love, please consider becoming a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good lunch. “When they started cheering in the middle of the poem, I practically stopped speaking, I was so startled. And all the newborn marsupials — Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
While a spare, poetic story accompanies each pictorial sequence, partway between fairy tale and magical realism, the text is only a contour around one of myriad possible shapes and shadings each watercolor dreamscape invites — each years in the painting, each a consummate Rorschach test for the poetic imagination that confers upon our waking hours the iridescent shimmer that makes life worth living. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on here, I receive a small percentage of its price.
But her poems are finding their way out into the world anyway — in an interview on NPR’s “Science Friday” a few weeks ago, in a glorious write up and poem reading in Brain Pickings that has since gone viral, and elsewhere during Poetry Month.
So it is with the voice of a poem.
See more of Brain Pickings on Facebook. Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. Complement it with Hirshfield’s beautiful ode to the leap day, then revisit Mary Oliver on what attention really means, Elizabeth Alexander on what poetry does for the human spirit, and great writers’ collected wisdom on the craft. It was Mabel who came to the Homestead to play piano while Emily hid upstairs, sending down brandy and poems; Mabel who coined the poet’s moniker “the Myth of Amherst”; Mabel who painted the flowers Emily had once pressed into a letter in a letter, then had the painting grace the cover of the first edition of her revolutionary poems, published posthumously and edited by Mabel herself. It is not, writes Colleen Morton Busch in Orion Magazine.