The Poet Laureate of
Kansas reads April 25, Wed., at the Lawrence Public Library—see
http://www.lawrence.lib.ks.us/ If you miss this springtime reading, check http://carynmirriamgoldberg.com for upcoming events. Earlier this spring, she and her husband burned grass as part of the renewal process for prairies. As
Poet Laureate, she has brought Kansas writers together as well as state poets
laureate from across the country. In 2011, she organized one of the few
national gatherings of poets laureate, from Rhode Island, Alaska, Texas, and
Alabama, as well as Midwestern states. She recently edited a collection of 150 poems
by Kansas poets to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Kansas, Begin
Again. She has organized a dozen group readings from this anthology. She
has more projects brewing.
In addition to advocacy
for writing, she is herself a fine poet. This title poem for the collection Landed
(2009) shows her balance of whimsy and observation. She walks the line of
sentiment, as she writes a celebratory nature poem. She focuses on specific
details, like a field guide, but her language creates the aesthetic. The curve
of a crow’s feather, “where it bows,” echoes the “long crescent” of her partner’s
body later in the poem. Her personal reflection complicates the descriptive
details also, putting them into a larger context. She writes, “whatever we
think of love is just the aerial view,” and likewise this poem gives us a new
way to view the cedars, grass, wind, and stories about love.
Landed
Here everything is a list of its details:
the surface of crow feather where it bows,
or echo of whippoorwill through the closed window
over the bed. The chiggers and the slow-creeping
cedar trees, milkweed webbed with spittlebug,
and the grass above and below ground,
mirroring out from a single point
of root and longing.
I'm landed here, in the center of something
not my own doing, and although I keep thinking
I'm alone, I'm dying, I'm afraid,
I'm making all that up.
The man I love is coming out of the woods,
the long crescent of his body closer, bowing to touch
something, say its name.
When he stands back up, he walks slowly to show me
whatever we think of love is just the aerial view
that tells you nothing compared to the soft green stems
that curl and fall with the wind, compared to how each step
across the grass is a form of falling
out of and into what losses make life possible.
The quick flashes, like the sun balancing
on the lip of the horizon right before
it goes out, like that moment the field golds
everything opaque, like how love strips us
out of the stories we have for love.
Caryn
Mirriam-Goldberg is the 2009-2012 Poet Laureate of Kansas, and a long-time
transformative language artist. She is a poet, fiction and non-fiction writer,
teacher, mentor, and facilitator. Founder of Transformative
Language Arts at Goddard College (where she teaches), and facilitator
of Brave Voice workshops.
Forthcoming books are The Divorce Girl, a novel
of art and soul, from Ice Cube Books and Needle in the Bone: How a Holocaust Survivor and Polish Resistance
Fighter Beat the Odds and Found Friendship, from Potomac Press. Other
books are Begin Again: 150 Kansas
Poems, editor, 2011,Woodley Memorial Press; An Endless Skyway: Poetry from
the State Poets Laureate, co-editor with Marilyn L. Taylor, Denise Low and
Walter Bargen, Ice Cube Books; Landed, poetry, Mammoth Publications; The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community &
Coming Home to the Body, Ice Cube Books; and The Power of Words: A Transformative Language Arts Reader, co-editor
with Janet Tallman, Ice Cube Books. More information is at
her website http://carynmirriamgoldberg.com/bio/
