read poetry regularly

Li-Young Lee is spectacular! Why had I never read anything from him before? His was the second poem in the “Fathers’ Prayers” section, and of course I couldn’t do just one so I read it. It’s called “A Story,” and it’s about a man whose son asks him to tell a new story, but he can’t think of one. It begins: “Sad is the man who is asked for a story/and can’t come up with one.” I especially love a section later in the poem:

      Are you a god,
the man screams, that I sit mute before you?
Am I a god that I should never disappoint?

No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.

Song, wisdom, sadness, joy: sweetness
equals three of any of these gravities.

My wife got a really great poetry anthology a while ago, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. There are a few hundred poems in it, broken into sections on war, denial, language, “zaniness,” etc. I’m going to try to read one poem from it every day, starting in the second section, “Fathers’ Prayers for Sons and Daughters.” Which section begins and ends with two poems from my favorite poet (William Stafford), so that’s got to be a good sign.

I’d like to renew the sense of involved wonder that I used to get from poetry. What Jane Hirshfield called “A different mode of knowing: . . . poetry’s knowing, and the increase of existence it brings.” That’s what I’m looking for.