Walt Whitman – O Me! O Life!
Walt Whitman’s O Me! O Life! is a rousing remonstrance of a self-centered life of faithless, foolish, vain, mean struggle that asks the question, where does the good lie in the midst of this endeavor?
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The Poem Is a Place in Which to Feel: Mary Oliver’s Tribute to Walt Whitman
In this stirring tribute to her shadow-companion and first poetic love Walt Whitman, poet Mary Oliver describes the experience of awakening to poetry as a door to the temple, a place ‘in which to feel’.
Allen Ginsberg – A Supermarket in California
Allen Ginsberg’s homage to Walt Whitman is a colorful, visionary encounter in a supermarket in Berkeley one night.
Walt Whitman – When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer encapsulates Walt Whitman’s approach to the world: silent, solitary and mystical.
The Lesson of a Tree – Walt Whitman
After Walt Whitman suffered a stroke at the age of 54, he spent his time immersed in nature as he slowly recovered his health. This passage from the collection of his notes and sketches called Specimen Days is a beautiful meditation on trees and their eloquence, endurance and imperturbability. ‘It is, yet says nothing,’ he… Continue reading The Lesson of a Tree – Walt Whitman
Philip Booth – First Lesson
A father teaches his daughter the art of buoyancy and incants a blessing for her survival.
Ursula K. Le Guin – Kinship
The mystical teachings of trees are beautifully expressed in Ursula K. Le Guin’s poem, Kinship, in which she explores our own primal origins.
Wendell Berry – The Peace of Wild Things
Berry’s poem looks to nature for release from world-weariness and despair, and suggests a kind of liberation through reviving our relationship with the wilderness.
Theodore Roethke – The Waking
Theodore Roethke was an intensely introspective poet whose work has been hailed by critics as some of the finest American poetry from the last century.
Galway Kinnell – Saint Francis and the Sow
though sometimes it is necessaryto reteach a thing its loveliness,to put a hand on its browof the flowerand retell it in words and in touchit is lovely – Galway Kinnell In a 2001 interview with The Christian Science Monitor, poet Galway Kinnell talked about seeing beyond the usual clichés of things: “‘Pig’ is a pejorative… Continue reading Galway Kinnell – Saint Francis and the Sow
