At one of my several favorite libraries yesterday a book called
100 Essential Modern Poems by Women fell into my hands—as many books seem to do. Essential poems?
I thought essential meant “stuff to keep me alive” like food,
water, air, love, friendship. Ah, friendship. Poems are friends. I get it.
Over the years I’ve come to call “friends” many of the earlier
women, like Emily Dickinson and Elinor Wylie also included in this anthology. Today I skip to the end to see who
my new friends might be. Louise
Erdrich, Rita Dove, Caroyn Forché, Heather McHugh, Jane Kenyon, Kay Ryan, Eavan
Boland, Ellen Bryant Voight, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, Marilyn Hacker, Mary
Oliver of course.
I have a chapter in Questions Writers Ask called “Can I Write Poetry?” It contains hundreds of
comments about the craft of writing it. Marianne Moore’s famous quip pops
out. “Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.”
Since my real gardens have turned into unappealing grey November
stick figure shadows of their former selves, I turn to the imaginary ones “planted” by the editors of 100
Essential…Joseph Parisi and Kathleen
Welton. The poems they selected are essential,
they say “because they deal with the most fundamental issues everyone
eventually faces and express in unforgettable ways the deepest experiences that
make us human: love, friendship, family (bonds and friction), longing and loss,
dreams and disappointments, anxiety, suffering, joy and our relation to nature.”
So, I am reminded once again, it is the deepest experiences that make us essential humans,
including friction, disappointments and anxiety.
They’re all mine. The grey gardens along side the pink
primrosed ones.
I'll leave you with what one of my essential friends, Jane Kenyon, said in “Happiness,” (which according to
this prolific New Hampshire woman no longer with us, "there is no accounting for.") “It comes even to the boulder/in
the perpetual shade of pine barrens,/to rain falling on the open sea,/ to the
wineglass, weary of holding wine.”
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