You can tell a lot about a poet by his or her first
loves as a reader of poetry, so by way of introduction I thought I’d recount my
first time reading a modern poet outside of Dr. Seuss, and describe my
subsequent obsession. I grew up in the
‘60s and ‘70s, in upstate New York, in a middle-class household devoid of
poetry. My father read Michener and
Ludlum, while my mother read Erma Bombeck and I’m OK, You’re OK. But, far
away, in the City (as we called New York), my great-aunt Leocadia adored poetry, as well as all the
arts. She had gone to Hunter College
just after the First World War and was what we called cultured; she even had,
my parents said, “real oil paintings” on her walls. Perusing the thin volumes lining her shelves when I was around
thirteen, I was drawn to the title Sea
Garden. I vaguely recalled from one
of my father’s out-loud New York Times
crossword sessions that H.D. was a poet’s abbreviated name. I opened to “Sea Rose”:
Rose, harsh
rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf…
H.D. was one of my early loves too, I took Sea Garden with me wherever I went for maybe 2 years at least, and Helen in Egypt + Trilogy are two of my favorite books of all time. Her insatiable curiosity, elegance, and imaginative synthesis of the archaic/feminine mythic with psychoanalytic insight and political outcry, her reimagining of the "feminine epic," changed my poetics and my life, and really expanded the field of American poetry. Thanks Greg!! XO
Posted by: sarah | June 21, 2010 at 02:36 PM