It was the 7th inning of last night’s Dodger-Blue Jays World Series game, the Dodgers leading 5-4. I needed sleep, so gave up watching, but nonetheless fervently hoped the Jays would pull it out against baseball’s best team money can buy and perennial champion.
I’m glad I left the screen early. The game went 18 innings! The Blue Jays lost.
For me, baseball is metaphor for something larger than itself—each batter in existential challenge, one against a field of nine. In short, the odds of getting that hit aren’t likely, and yet batters do come through, sometimes winning a game.
As I waited for sleep to descend, I thought of how tonight’s game reflected my America, facing the hegemony of an encroached political dynasty. Would things ever change?
I fell asleep, expectant.
And so with our nation.
I refuse to give up hope. There’s yet another day, another game to be played. Sometimes the unexpected happens—the underdog breaks through. That happens in life, too. We get that hit. We score that run.
As poet Joy Sullivan tells us, “i know nothing about baseball, but something in me breaks with joy when the runner rushes in, body flung & reaching, & the umpire lifts his arms out like a prophet or a mother & makes him safe.”
Childhood should be our Eden, a time for innocence before the shadows come and we lament its loss.
This morning I’m enjoying my romp in Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West Poems, a collection of her prose poems, reminiscent in many ways of beloved Mary Oliver’s peace-conferring verse. Sullivan lived her childhood in Africa, the daughter of medical missionaries.
In one poem that means much to me, she shares her memory of untainted innocence that helps us recover our own dormant memories of a garden world we cannot enter again:
“Growing Up”
All I could think about was filling these cups and staining these lips and being some new kind of loveable. All the while, my mama in her quiet, weary way: one day, you’ll wish for this time without worry. No one can really ever warn you how the world is a thick leather boot. A midnight car slowing down. An oil spill. A matchstick.
I miss the girl my mother still could see— unadorned, untired. The one, at dusk, who followed the dog into the woods unafraid.
I’m about to eat breakfast, but I feel guilty for the good life I wake to daily when so much of the world, removed from our shores, knows only war, destruction, death, and incalculable grief: Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine and Gaza. Still others.
I am moved by Palestinian-American poet and physician Fady Joudah’s recent poem about Gaza. The death toll, vastly civilian, now approaches 70,000.
Joudah has lost 100 members of his Gaza family. He has served as a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders.
Since his poem is under copyright, I can only share an excerpt:
“And out of nowhere…”
And out of nowhere a girl receives an ovation from her rescuers, all men on their knees and bellies clearing the man-made rubble with their bare hands, disfigured by dust into ghosts. All disasters are natural including this one, because humans are natural. The rescuers tell her she’s incredible, powerful, and for a split second, before the weight of her family’s disappearance sinks her, she smiles, like a child who lived for seven years above ground receiving praise.
PostScript: Joudah is a winner of The Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and long listed for the National Book Award for Poetry (2024).
I remember it well. I was a young graduate student, privileged to study under one of the world’s foremost professors of Victorian literature, a renowned authority on Thomas Hardy.
The course was rigorous. We read the greats of the age—Macaulay, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Mill, Newman, Arnold, Morris, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Hopkins, Pater, and of course Hardy. Yet strikingly absent was Rudyard Kipling. Our professor dismissed him as the mere voice of imperialist Britain—an attitude then dominant in the Academy, and one I suspect still lingers on American university campuses.
I had never read Kipling. I had not yet learned to question. I accepted what I was told.
It was only later, during a summer course at Exeter College, Oxford, that I encountered another view: one that esteemed Kipling’s literary brilliance without committing the American folly of conflating his politics with the merits of his artistry.
Kipling’s literary range was astonishing. His verse, endowed with rhythmic command, borders on the hypnotic. He opened poetry to colloquial speech and became a supreme craftsman of the ballad form.
Yes, he gave voice to Empire in works like The White Man’s Burden, Kim, and The Jungle Books. But he also revered Indian culture—its spirituality, wisdom, and sensory richness. Often, with subtle irony, he questioned the very order he seemed to affirm.
Perhaps his greatest achievement lies in the short story. With precision and nuance, he crafted narratives of extraordinary compression, modern in their suggestiveness, wide-ranging in their scope. The Man Who Would Be King remains a masterpiece—its sweep and power undiminished. Kipling’s influence on Conrad, Maugham, Hemingway, Borges, and others is beyond doubt.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907—the first English-language writer to receive it—honored for his “power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration.”
Kipling’s stories, like all enduring art, probe psychological depths. They are complex, skeptical of conventional wisdom, and riveting in their precision.
In today’s multicultural Britain, he is taught in context: his genius as a storyteller acknowledged, his colonial perspective rejected. Lewis, Tolkien, and Pullman have recognized him as a precursor to modern fantasy.
In India, where he was born and spent his early years, his reception is understandably ambivalent: many readers disdaining his imperial condescension, yet acknowledging his literary craftsmanship. Salman Rushdie has called Kim “one of the greatest novels written about India,.” Other Indian writers continue where Kipling left off, offering vivid vignettes of India, but through an Indian prism.
Controversy about his place in the Western literary canon remains. Vladimir Nabokov, in his Cornell lectures, dismissed Kipling for his moralizing, He deemed his indulgence in exotic adventure stories as juvenile. Great literature, he argued, obeys the aesthetic imperative of narrative neutrality, or distance, as in Flaubert and Joyce.
On the other hand, the late eminent Yale critic Harold Bloom came to Kipling’s defense. In his The Western Canon. Bloom lists Kipling among hundreds of writers deserving inclusion in the canon. Bloom saw Kipling as a myth maker and gifted story teller, especially in his short stories. On the other hand, he found his poetry “scarcely bear reading.”
While I find merit in both Nabokov’s and Bloom’s arguments, I lean towards Bloom’s appraisal as more balanced. I have long resisted either/or equations, particularly as to the political or aesthetic. Over a lifetime, I have frequently found reasoned judgment occupies a middle place. I have given my own arguments earlier in this essay for his belonging in the canon.
Whatever a reader’s verdict, Kipling was a singular voice, very much his own man. In short, authentic. As he said in an interview shortly before his death,
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself” (Qtd. in the Kipling Journal, June 1967).
Ralph Waldo Emerson ranks high on any list of frequently quoted American sages. He has a special way of rendering human experience palpable.
Among his many essays, I’ve especially liked “Compensation,” which I first read as a young graduate student in an American Lit class.
Undoubtedly a residue of his exploration of Eastern thought, this essay has journeyed a lifetime with me in its karma undertones, buoying me up in its harbinger of moral recompense for life’s myriad inequities.
But on occasion, Emerson fumbled, as when he wrote that “money represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses” (“Nominalist and Realist,” Essays: Second Series, 1844).
Critics were quick to pounce, Marxists in particular seeing it as capitulating to capitalism. Emerson probably meant that the pecuniary is an integral component of the natural order.
Still, it seems a passage one wants to expunge like disturbing phlegm.
I like Saul Bellow’s correction: “Uch! How they love money, thought Wilhelm. They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful money! It was getting so that people were feeble-minded about everything except money. While if you didn’t have it you were a dummy, a dummy! You had to excuse yourself from the face of the earth!” (“Seize the Day”).
But let me also share psychologist and poet Pamela Joyce Shapiro’s response to Emerson’s remark. Her poem speaks for me and perhaps for you:
If money is the prose of life as beautiful as roses, poetry it seems must be the soil and sun of infinity, without which surely nothing grows. I see the pleasures each might bring, when flourishing in abundant spring. Though stocks and petals tend to fall in drought or storm or just because, poetry survives it all. What losses can define what loss is? Waning wealth or stolen roses? Forget the till and till the mind, plant poetry and praise the sky.
I’ve always been a devotee of the poetry of William Butler Yeats, though not of his metaphysics or his politics. Certainly, his reception in Ireland over the years has been bleak, the latest hostile critic, contemporary novelist Sally Rooney piling on, dismissing his politics as fascist, with the takeaway he isn’t worth reading.
Though he flirted with authoritarianism, agitated by the chaos he associated with democracy, he supported the Free State and later repudiated Mussolini, whom he initially admired. He was never the likes of Ezra Pound. In one of his final poems, “Politics,” he expresses his disillusionment with political ideologies proffering easy remedies for society’s ills.
Yeats should not be judged removed from the convulsions that gave birth to an Ireland free of its English masters.
Ireland’s ostracizing of its literary giants has a long history, not only with Yeats, but James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faoláin, and the late Edna O’Brien, all of whom chose exile.
I bristle against censorship and book banning to which it often leads. Things are changing in Ireland, a nation I know well, but old attitudes can find an audience still.
Yeats remains worth reading, his poetry arguing for itself in its craftsmanship, beauty, and relevance. His often quoted “The Second Coming” hovers over us in its prescient warning of autocracy’s sinister reach.
“A Prayer for My Daughter” remains among my favorite Yeats poems—subdued in tone, subtle in rhythm, redolent in wisdom.
Written in 1919 in the context of Ireland’s incipient nationalism that would spark a civil war and the country’s ultimate partition, the poem expresses Yeats’ hopes for his new daughter in a less turbulent future.
A poem abundant in symbolism, Yeats prays she shun hatreds, value inner over external beauty, find solace in tradition and ceremony.
I value the poem, not least, for its relevance to our own time.
Excerpt:
May she become a flourishing hidden tree That all her thoughts may like the linnet be, And have no business but dispensing round Their magnanimities of sound, Nor but in merriment begin a chase, Nor but in merriment a quarrel. O may she live like some green laurel Rooted in one dear perpetual place.
My mind, because the minds that I have loved, The sort of beauty that I have approved, Prosper but little, has dried up of late, Yet knows that to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief. If there’s no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.
An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?
This last stanza obviously alludes to Maude Gonne, who had become a strident voice of Irish nationalism and to whom Yeats had twice proposed marriage, but was rejected.
In 1990, I was privileged to meet and converse with Anne, the daughter in this poem.
Whatever our views on artists such as Yeats, or antisemite T.S. Eliot, or Chilean fervent communist Pablo Neruda, I subscribe to the autonomy of art. It’s narcissistic to think artists must share our views.
I read a lot, but the genre that makes my heart beat faster is poetry, doubtless because I’m a very feeling person.
A lot of what I read these days purports to being poetry when it isn’t.
I know I’m reading poetry when it becomes more than it is, words taking on nuance beyond themselves.
Often I find poetry in music. Take, for example, Bono’s “Grace,” transcending a girl’s name, to becoming extended metaphor of redemptive goodness:
Grace It’s the name for a girl It’s also a thought that Changed the world And when she walks on the street You can hear the strings Grace finds goodness In everything
Another example would be the Beatles’ haunting “Eleanor Rigby,” exemplum of loneliness, or disconnectedness, hidden amid the crowd, but profoundly present:
Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been Lives in a dream Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door Who is it for?
All the lonely people Where do they all come from? All the lonely people Where do they all belong?
I want to step back from writing about politics, at least for now. We all have our views, and too often—much like professing religious beliefs—we run headlong into barbed-wire intolerance.
Some find distraction, even intoxication, in endless hours of media; others in sports; still others in hobbies that bring both pleasure and mastery—or in the familiar solace of alcohol.
I prefer reading, not just any kind, but what helps me grow and be more aware I’m not alone. Lately, it’s been nature memoirs, especially like H is for Hawk. I want to get back to my beloved Thoreau and not least, Wendell Berry. I miss Tolstoy.
Of course, we shouldn’t extract from nature what really derives from our imposed views such as we find in Wordsworth’s poetry. Nature, as writer James Rebank reminds us, “isn’t all butterflies, sunshine and healing.”
Still, whenever I step outside the human world, there descends this quieting solace, and I think myself made whole again.
Yesterday, Dec. 10th, marked the 194th birthday of Emily Dickinson (b. 1830), one of America’s most gifted poets.
Her love of nature, keen observations on life’s ironies, and daring truthfulness won me over early. I know of no poetry with more nuance.
Of her many poems, my favorite is “A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest” with its nature analogies exhibiting the incongruity of the outer appearance with the inner reality. We are often masters at concealing life’s griefs.
Though I’ve visited The Homestead (Amherst , MA) on several occasions, I’m ready to visit again to take-in the Dickinson Museum updates, which include the restoration of Emily’s beloved garden, her father’s gifted conservatory to Emily and her sister, Lavinia, and the recently completed reconstruction of the family’s carriage house.
In short, The Homestead is my literary Mecca, as there is much in Emily’s sensibility that resonates with me.
Below, Emily’s upstairs bedroom where she composed her nearly 2000 poems and many letters:
It was cerebral musician Patty Smith who reminded me of Dickinson’s birthday in her substack post, replete with quotations from her poems and letters.
I’m repeating them here, as they superbly express Dickinson’s keen sensitivity and writing acumen. Smith observes that any of them would serve well as a writing prompt:
“Forever is composed of nows.”
“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”
“We turn not older with years but newer every day.”
“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”
“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”
“That it will never come again is what makes life sweet. Dwell in possibility. Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
“Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”
“The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul–BOOKS.”
“The lovely flowers embarrass me. They make me regret I am not a bee…”
“I don’t profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense.”
“Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.”
“Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.”
“To shut your eyes is to travel.”
“your brain is wider than the sky”
“How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world,–you must have noticed them in the street,–how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?”
“I have been bent and broken, but -I hope- into a better shape.”
I’ve been writing poetry or whatever it is since I was five or six years old, and I couldn’t stop, I never could stop. I don’t know why I did it.… It was like a stream that went along beside me, you know, my life went along here, and I got married and had three kids and did all the things you have to do, and all along the time this stream was going along. And I really didn’t know what it was saying. It just talked to me, and I wrote it down. So I can’t even take much credit for it.” — Ruth Stone
The late Ruth Stone’s poetry gives me goosebumps. It’s that good —observant, conversational, intimate, punctuated with humor, resonating life in all its undulations.
It’s Saturday afternoon. I lie here on my bed, going through Stone’s poems as the world pursues its daily tasks. Quietness is my paradise, allowing space to reflect on essentials that matter. Stone’s poetry does that well.
Ruth Stone (1915-2011) didn’t have it easy. A mother of three children, her husband committed suicide, plunging her into abject poverty. Her poetry prowess, however, earned her a piecemeal income through itinerant, short term teaching assignments at universities across America.
Between teaching gigs, she’d return to her home in Goshen, Vermont, crafting new poems and short stories, her talent earning her two Guggenheim awards.
Academy recognition came late. In 2002, she won the National Book Award for Poetry at age 87 (2002).
What puzzles me is that she remains widely unknown. Her poetry, abundant in robust metaphor, drawn from science and nature, stands on its own, defiant of imitation.
Stone saw life in all its teeming distillations, especially in regard to aging, about which she could be merciless.
Her death came in 2011 at age 96.
Her humble home in Goshen, soul of her prodigious output (13 books), has been designated a historical landmark and become a retreat for literary studies. Her informal grave is nearby.
Below, the Ruth Stone poem that fulfills Emily Dickinson observation on what makes for a good poem: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry…Is there any other way?” ( L342a, 1870):
“Always on the Train”
Writing poems about writing poems is like rolling bales of hay in Texas. Nothing but the horizon to stop you.
But consider the railroad’s edge of metal trash; bird perches, miles of telephone wires. What is so innocent as grazing cattle? If you think about it, it turns into words.
Trash is so cheerful; flying up like grasshoppers in front of the reaper. The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers, squares of clear plastic–windows on a house of air.
Below the weedy edge in last year’s mat, red and silver beer cans. In bits blown equally everywhere, the gaiety of flying paper and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.
Brimmings: up from the well 