Forrest Gander
The rain broke off          an hour earlier, the turn
the turn-signal indicator ceased           the last of its clucking, and

we arrived             at the abandoned farm arrived
with others just now        bailing themselves out

from their cars, our voices        pitched in some ad-
mixture of ease and          exhilaration, some

adventure in happiness if          there were such a thing and it wasn't
pretend: laughing, slamming         the doors, we were miscible, we believed

we were friends, remember that?            and your floriferous
bridesmaids still wearing those                  purple plumeria headbands

like Goa hippies. The serpentine            footpath to the river steamed—
it steamed in sunlight         adding to the fullness without

adding weight. You,              to whom this place was a given,
sacred even, and so not given                to you, pointed out

peacock tracks in the mud. Through              an old orchard on either side
of us, where swollen jackfruit           hung on slender limbs,

swarms of midges              bobbed up and down
like balled hairnets in the light             breeze. Before it

became visible, we heard          the river river
and behind it the        gurgling of runoff

down bluffs of packed alluvium.         Jacaranda perfume
mixed with pong             from your neighbor's

breeder-houses. Who could look         into that afternoon and see
it closing? Our whole            queue halted when you went

to one knee, when you crouched             at a puddle to coo
to a fat toad. Gone        quiet, we were hypnotized

by the signature         enthusiasm
in your face. As the sun                 cleared the clouds, you

glanced back to find my eyes             eyes fixed on you, and what
I felt then               gave me cause

to recall                 the pleasure breaking out
on the faces of musicians              in that pause

between their last note between             their last note and
the applause. What             you said, what I said. What

we did we did until there was no interval between us.
from the book TWICE ALIVE / New Directions
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Influenced by a form of “Sangam” literature called akam, “Pastoral” links human emotion to the landscape in which it takes place. Caesura and repetition—“the turn/ the turn-signal,” “the river river”—interrupt smooth elaborations of syntax, enacting a mind in the process of working through memory, checking itself, revising. The poem is full of attentive tenderness, emphasized—isn’t rhyme a kind of wedding?—by off-rhymes in critical places—queue, coo, and you; cause, pause, and applause, for example. 
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"What the Bolinas Poets Built"

"In an afterword to the new edition of On the Mesa, the scholar Lytle Shaw writes that Bolinas was the 'only instance I could think of where a town was essentially governed by poets.' Shaw’s claim is almost too mild: on the evidence of this anthology, the town was governed at least in part by the poetry itself.' 

via THE NEW YORKER
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Cover of Sylvia Plath's book, The Collected Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Corinna Vallianatos on Sylvia Plath's "Blackberrying"

"Nothing is ever nothing—description gives nothing shape. The seeing gains power, even as the one doing the seeing recedes. The bounty of what’s come before, the berries and their juices and the milkbottle the speaker uses to collect them, which brings to mind the body and domesticity, lifts at the end into the elemental, something seemingly less comforting but, to me, more so."
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