In this short poem, Li Bai writes about the experience of zazen (meditation) using some of the simplest and most common imagery of the time - birds and clouds for the passing phenomena of the mind, and the mountain for the stability of awareness, which eventually is the only thing that remains.
"Only the seaIs free of such calculations." Susan Barba Declared 'a poem worth framing' by one reviewer, Susan Barba's How Should We Live Our Lives? dips into a stream of questions and musings reminiscent in style of Mary Oliver's simple and probing verse. She starts with love and trepidation and ends with an… Continue reading Susan Barba – How Should We Live Our Lives?
Adachi Chiyono (also known as Mugai Nyodai) was the daughter of a samurai warrior in the 13th century who became the first woman - and mother - to found and head a Zen monastery in Japan.
'So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost,' writes Elizabeth Bishop in the first stanza of one of her most well-known poems. Having lost her father before she even knew him, her mother to mental illness at a very young age, and years later her partner to suicide, Bishop was close to… Continue reading One Art – Elizabeth Bishop’s Poem About Learning to Lose
The term between eternity and immortality - our lives - is the subject of Emily Dickinson's poem number 721. It's a gentle vision of life melting and disappearing into a drift and the being itself a 'miracle' as she refers to it in the last verse. She also uses the image of the moon reflected… Continue reading Behind Me – dips Eternity – Emily Dickinson
In her poem, Life is Beautiful, Dorianne Laux is literally making art from trash as she considers the wonder of a fly and its lifecycle through the things that we discard. That the miraculous can exist in the most pungent and fecund places, and that the birth of a maggot in such a world can… Continue reading Dorianne Laux – Life is Beautiful
Picking up on Les Kaye's theme of harmonizing our inner lives with the demands and responsibilities of work, it's inspiring to look at a poet like Wallace Stevens who composed his poems while commuting to and from his job as a lawyer and businessman. A fervent advocate of the transformative power of the imagination, Stevens… Continue reading One Must Have A Mind Of Winter
Although Toni Morrison was primarily a novelist and an essayist, The Dewdrop was excited to find a short series of poems also penned by the author as a special contribution to the Black Mountain Institute. The five poems were printed back in 2002 for a limited edition letterpress that was released to help raise funding… Continue reading I Am Not Seaworthy – Toni Morrison
Can writing with your wrong hand beat writer's block? Are maternity leave and creativity at all compatible? Danielle Pieratti, The Dewdrop's featured poet this week, knows. The author of 'Fugitives', a collection that won the 2016 Idaho Prize and the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for Poetry, she has also published two chapbooks: 'By the Dog… Continue reading Why I Write – Danielle Pieratti
'Triptych' by Danielle Pieratti is a dream-like scene that at once expounds a loaded world contained in a moment, a sail 'unhooked' and unfurling through a countryside picture. The poem holds an entire scale of refracted imagery, from the everyday image of two people, one observing the other while knee-high in mud, to the wider… Continue reading Triptych by Danielle Pieratti
