“Here is a symbol…” begins the Robinson Jeffers poem, “Rock and Hawk,” the order of those in the title, as in all poetry, meaningful. The setting is a “headland” of Jeffers’s beloved and rugged northern California (Big Sur) coast, where we read (and see, through the poet’s eyes), a hard, unfeeling gray rock, “standing tall…/where the seawind/Lets no tree grow…” Jeffers lets us know the rock has also proven unmoved by earthquakes and “ages of storms,” so stout and unyielding it is in its essence, repelling all who would seek to impinge on its domain. With one exception. Because after…
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My original template for this blog did not include the “Politics/Culture” category you see off to the right of your screen, where the site’s archives stretch back to 2012. At the time, I fancied Traversing as a kind of haven from the hurly burly world of politics, a place where sometimes weighty, sometimes light-hearted issues of how to live in, reflect on and understand the world could be discussed under a multi-hued blanket of the arts, religion, psychology and philosophy. Another six months on, I was nearing the end of a post on songs by the folkies John Stewart and…
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Post-election, I seem to have been keeping Walt Whitman’s “Complete Poems” close at hand, an old thick paperback, quintessentially dog-eared, the binding now so flaccid that it lies primly flat against my chest on this late fall day as I type these words. I’m in southern California for my sister’s memorial weekend, an otherwise somber affair leavened both by the prospect of gathering in solidarity with a good part of my nuclear clan and its various affiliates, and by the region living up to its reputation as it unfurls yet another 78-degree day of balmy sunshine right on the cusp…
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A rarity here, I know, but I’m none too sure I can say much more about this poem that isn’t stark raving obvious and powerful already in its scorching, emphatic admonition to just get the hell out of the way of the life you have lived and come to rest in it. (But that doesn’t mean I won’t try…) But…wow! Actually, Dorianne Laux (pronounced “Low”) starts with a “Pow!” in her first two-word declarative sentence that runs us pretty much head-first into the poem’s meaning, message and takeaway: “Regret nothing.” She doesn’t plunk an exclamation point on the end of…
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The relatively raging success that Billy Collins has enjoyed as a poet has not come without detractors who decry his free-flowing use of straightforward language and thematic material. This approach makes his poems generally easy to comprehend and, not unimportantly for him and his publishers, huge sellers—at least in comparison to most poetry that has always been the poor stepchild of the literary world. The now 83-year-old Collins has published 18 volumes of poetry since his 1977 debut volume. The first half-dozen or so went the usual small or university press route that sold a few hundred, maybe up to…