A New Book
Fall is coming along here now. The first few branches of the maples are turning red and yellow. The bees are busy among the white and purple asters and the hummingbirds are gone until spring. The days are shorter and at night sounds carry great distances--a good time to read Jimenez and Lorca again.
My next collection, I Didn't Come Here to Meet You, is starting to take shape. I've been writing this book for three years and wasn't even aware of the connections between the new poems. Two quotes made me aware of hidden shadow the manuscript was beginning to cast: "Absence makes what? Presence, presence" (John Thompson); and "All the waters of the world find one another again" (Hermann Hesse). It will be a varied book, style-wise: lined poems and prose poems, small poems and a long elegy called "Requiem." I figure another 12 months of revision and the manuscript will be almost there.
Finally, a small fall poem. The last of the blueberries are picked, but when I was in the field above the house last week, I remembered this little piece from twenty years ago:
BLUEBERRIES
After picking blueberries alone all afternoon
I carry
some consciousness of the fields back with me.
(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)
My next collection, I Didn't Come Here to Meet You, is starting to take shape. I've been writing this book for three years and wasn't even aware of the connections between the new poems. Two quotes made me aware of hidden shadow the manuscript was beginning to cast: "Absence makes what? Presence, presence" (John Thompson); and "All the waters of the world find one another again" (Hermann Hesse). It will be a varied book, style-wise: lined poems and prose poems, small poems and a long elegy called "Requiem." I figure another 12 months of revision and the manuscript will be almost there.
Finally, a small fall poem. The last of the blueberries are picked, but when I was in the field above the house last week, I remembered this little piece from twenty years ago:
BLUEBERRIES
After picking blueberries alone all afternoon
I carry
some consciousness of the fields back with me.
(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)
posted by Al Cooper at 9:50 AM
2 Comments:
Yes, I think of body memory, brain wirings that work the way plants in fields unfold, the roots of plants and people sometimes tapping identical minerals, sometimes the minerals containing arrowhead cave carvings primal fern forests shuddered in winds, the openness of the sky whether soaked with root reachings or leaf solar tunings, the positionings, spiral unfolding, visitations by grosbeaks and finches, nearby booming waves whether seaside or solar downflow in molecular stations inside leaf memory, the health and ongoingness that puts chores into long-standing light and shading... and of course the blueberries in hand.
Jim
Been a witness to your life and your work for the past forty years. Certainly an influence in my life.
Thank You
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