Where We Are Now

It is hard to imagine that it is already 2006. I remember being a child and thinking that the year 2000 could never come. Yet, it has, and here we are six years later.

Small Branches Poetry (the blog) is a year old today. Thank you for stopping in to read now and again. Yes, it's mostly a monolouge, the sound of one voice speaking, but you're welcome to comment, to agree or disagree, as you wish.

I return again and again to The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry edited by J.D McClatchy. This is the book that made me fall for poetry. It collects work from post-WW II through the 80's. Here is where I first read Snodgrass's "Heart's Needle," Levine's "The Horse," and Roethke, and Hirsch, and Snyder, and Kinnell, sixty-five in all. And such great lines, that speak to me as both a person and as a student of poetry:

And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.
--Axe Handles, Gary Snyder

Yet I,
who say this, could not raise
myself from bed how many days
to the thieving world. Child, I have another wife,
another child. We try to choose our life.
--Heart's Needle, W.D. Snodgrass


For 2006, I choose more kindness to those around me, more joy, more time with my husband, more laughter from my children, and as always more poetry & conversations with you.

Cheers!