Jaye Lawrence (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} wordswoman) wrote,@ 2006-06-10 08:29:00 |
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| Entry tags: | poetry |
Happiness
How ironic that it should be Miss Snark, who "vents her wrath on the hapless world of writers and crushes them to sand," that reminded me to read Jane Kenyon. The Snarky One's post yesterday include a Kenyon poem, "Happiness," so beautiful it made me ache.
There's just no accounting for happiness,or the way it turns up like a prodigalwho comes back to the dust at your feethaving squandered a fortune far away.
Read the full text of "Happiness" on Poets.org
Only a very few works of poetry or prose inspire this fierce pleasure-pain reaction in me, equal parts a reader's joy and a writer's envy. First "Oh God, how perfect, how beautiful, how true," and then "Oh God, if I live to a be a hundred I will never write anything that shines like this."
Tobias Wolff has done that to me more than once, and Raymond Carver. But more often it is poetry, sometimes the unlikeliest poetry. Wislawa Szymborska's poem "Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition," and James Dickey's "The Bee." Rita Dove's "Daystar," about a mother wanting a moment alone to think (how I remember that desire!). Jane Kenyon again, with "Otherwise," for its reminder of mortality (Kenyon herself died of leukemia before the age of 50). James Wright's "A Blessing," with its two Indian ponies.
Beauty. Bliss. Words.
