Spring is on the way. Daffadills are blooming. And at the Kingsport Public Library, I've check out The Best American Poetry 2011, with guest editor Kevin Young, and I'd like to recommend it to you. It's always seemed a little presumptuous to me to claim to find the best, but I guess it depends on where you look. Credits include The Paris Review, The American Scholar, the Atlantic, and of course, Poetry. And lots more. There are new names, but some familiar ones, too. I was taken with Patricia Smith's "Motown Crown." It sings.
Charles Simic's "Nineteen Thirty-Eight" (Paris Review) begins with the Nazis marching into Vienna, the year the poet was born. It ends: "I lay in my crib . . . [and] heard myself cry for a long, long time."
Then I found Richard Wilbur's "Ecclesiastes II:I." (the New Yorker). He's casting bread upon the waters, still, "Betting crust and crumb / That birds will gather, and that / One more spring will come." Shelley couldn't have said it better. Go read!
Charles Simic's "Nineteen Thirty-Eight" (Paris Review) begins with the Nazis marching into Vienna, the year the poet was born. It ends: "I lay in my crib . . . [and] heard myself cry for a long, long time."
Then I found Richard Wilbur's "Ecclesiastes II:I." (the New Yorker). He's casting bread upon the waters, still, "Betting crust and crumb / That birds will gather, and that / One more spring will come." Shelley couldn't have said it better. Go read!
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