My family and I try to make it every year to the Grand Tetons to camp, and even though odds seemed against it the first pandemic summer, we managed to get there mid-August. I'd brought a collection of Haiku with me, trying to find some way to get closer to the aesthetic in them, the ethic in them. This poem came of that effort—thinking of the pine needle's inch in relation to the mountains behind it, the absurdities of scale in which a tree can look larger than a peak, and how that same vertiginous quality can occur when the pine needle is used as measure of other things. One's life, the span of day… |
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What Sparks Poetry:
A Short List of Books Ilya Kaminsky Loved in 2021
"Kevin Young's music can be erotic, it can be surreal, it can be serious, revelatory, or playful, or all of this at once: 'Where the train once rained / through town / like a river, where the water // rose in early summer / & froze come winter— / where the moon // of the outhouse shone / its crescent welcome, / where the heavens opened // & the sun wouldn't quit— / past the gully or gulch / or holler or ditch // I was born.' Stones is a gorgeous book. No one writes like Kevin Young. Frankly, no one can." |
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