Martha Silano’s homage to Heather McHugh who had a few weeks of one-on-one.
what comes to mind first is her handwriting; more specifically, her messy comments scrawled all over my mostly-awful rough drafts with a bright red Sharpie. Once she wrote at the bottom of a very pathetic and worthless poem: This is so sad. God, did that comment ever make it obvious I’d written a poem not worth fixing! Another time she placed a big X through the last six lines of a poem. Next to it she’d scrawled You can stop now — enough already!
I adored Heather’s work, and now I was learning about the woman behind the poems, this teacher who could be warm and encouraging, and also tell me to shut up without making me cry or feel stupid or prevent me from writing the next poem. She exuded warmth, seemed to have complete confidence in my abilities, and yet she had no trouble giving me the proverbial slap upside the head.
Jan Zwicky on reviewing is part of a Lemonhound series. She says why review? “To inform people who might be interested in reading the book that it exists, and to offer an imaginatively and intellectually engaged appreciation of it.” She considers reviewing as moral reform, by generosity and respect, or shaming.
Kristin Berkey-Abbot’s tribute to Jane Kenyon includes a pointing to Donald Hall on life with Jane Kenyon where he said,
If anyone had asked us, “Which year was the best, of your lives together?” we could have agreed on an answer: “the one we remember least.”
Keith Wilkinson’s blog includes beauty, including this poem of his George ‘n’ Me
I don’t think he could remember my name,
and I decided I didn’t have anything to say to him
that was worth saying, so we just looked at each other
across the aisle, slightly amused, slightly affectionately,
as we might have looked at a moth on a rock,
Lots of beauty out there.