Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Jack Gilbert

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Pete in first snow, 2011That 30-pound wonder to the left there, in that tiny photo, is, variously, Sweet Pete, Pete, Petey, Pedro, Peter, and Little Guy. He has been, variously, captivating, surprising, startling, annoying, tiring, and delighting us for 12 years now. He’s one of those dogs you sometimes wish weren’t as smart as he is. I remember, back when we first got him, watching him observe people opening the door to the kitchen, a door that we kept closed in order to keep him out of there. When he thought no one was in the room (I was stealth-sitting in a far corner), he jumped up, braced his front legs on the door, and began batting at the knob with his right paw until presto, the door opened, whereupon he raced into the kitchen and gobbled down an entire cooling rack of oatmeal scotchies in the 2.5 seconds it took me to race in there after him. He has taught himself how to do many, many other things in the intervening years. He can read my mind and I can read his. Right now he’s asleep at my feet, having ascertained the situation: She’s tapping at the thing again. She’s still in her pajamas. In about an hour she’ll put on her jeans and sweatshirt and come at me with the leash. I might as well take a nap until then. When I read this poem by Jack Gilbert, who is one of my favorite poets, I thought, you know what? If we have to come back to this world, coming back as a dog might not be so bad.

Alone
– Jack Gilbert

I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s Dalmation. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on their lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.

 

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For more on Jack Gilbert, please click here.

Nanowrimo Kick-Off Talk!

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Voyage of Life, every dayDear readers, writers, fellow humans,

I’ll be giving a talk –“The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer”– to kick off National Novel-Writing Month on Sunday, November 1, from 2-3 pm at the fabulous Westport Public Library.

I’ve been working on this talk for a long time, maybe 25 years or so, which is coincidentally (or not!) about the same amount of time I’ve been writing novels. It’s a thrill to be speaking at such a hallowed place, and I’d love to meet you there.

Come on, come all, no reservations required.

 

 

Poem of the Week, by Edgar Allen Poe

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Poetry hut Poe fanI found this note in my poetry hut the other day (the poetry public is more demanding than you’d think), went straight to my computer, dug out my favorite Poe poem, printed it out, and stuck it in the poetry hut with a note that read “For the Poe fan!”

Next day, it was gone.

 

 

A Dream Within a Dream
– Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow:
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand–
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep–while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

 

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For more about Edgar Allan Poe, click here.

Poem of the Week, by Gaius Valerius Catullus

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Last week in the class I’m teaching we went around the room and each student recited a poem from memory. One man recited the below poem, one I had never heard before, and at first I thought he himself had written it; it was so brief and raw and real. But no, it’s a poem by Catullus, who died in Verona more than two thousand years ago at the age of 30. I drove home thinking about this poem, and then I looked up Catullus and have been reading his work, the little that we have from the one manuscript unearthed long after his death, ever since. The more things change, the more they don’t, even over thousands of years.

Poem 85
– Gaius Valerius Catullus

I hate and I love
Why do I, you ask ?
I don’t know, but it’s happening
and it hurts.

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
    nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
(In the original Latin)

 

For more information on Catullus, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Javier Etchevarren

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I read this poem the other day, my first time reading this poet. The scenes being described were so ordinary but slightly weird, like the image of a mother waiting at school with an apple pie for her grown son. I was zipping right along, happy that the family in the poem had come to this peaceful time in their lives together, the sadnesses and strain behind them, and then I came to the ending. And thought, This is one of those poems that does what poems can do.

Reunion
– Javier Etchevarren, translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval

Mama works less
and hugs me more.
She waits for me
at the school doors
with an apple pie
(no matter that I
am 30 plus years old).

My older brother
has not lost his job.
Luckily,
he has quit smoking
in our bedroom.

My middle brother
has stopped breaking
his back for others
and uncorks an expensive wine.

My father
—who has quit drinking—
returns to the house
and asks forgiveness.
We forgive him.

We smile for the picture
while weeping with joy:
all my family reunited
in this poem.

 

For more information on Javier Etchevarren, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Ernest Hilbert

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Once when my son was little I overheard him and some of his friends whispering in the doorway where they had snuck up to watch me type. “Is your mom the fastest typer in the whole world?” one of them said. “Yup,” my son said, “she is.” When it comes to typing all I want is speed, because then my fingers can outrace my thoughts and spin words out without thinking. But when it comes to cooking and quilting and gardening, slowness is what matters, physical labor that absorbs hands and muscles and lets thoughts wander free. (As I wrote that last sentence it just occurred to me that maybe speed and slowness are actually the same thing. Same coin, flip sides.) Poem of the Week, by Ernest Hilbert.

Song
– Ernest Hilbert

A song for those who learn forgotten, slow
skills, crafts submerged long past by massed commerce,
by hard, dark, oily machines, and the din
of duplicates shipped by the millions, stowed
in cavernous depots to be dispersed
to each home, used once, and then binned.
This is for those who weave by hand, who brew
their own suds, and roll their own smokes, hammer
together shelves, print on presses, plant gardens
in vacant lots, raise beams, fire pots, the few
who challenge the swift, transient tenor
of the age, the lonely sincere wardens,
the last, noble pull of old ways restored,
valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.

For more information on Ernest Hilbert, please click here: here.

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The Conjuring of "Firefly Hollow"

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Firefly Hollow coverMy new novel for children, Firefly Hollow, with its enchanting illustrations by Christopher Denise, has been in the world for one week as of today. Except not really, seeing as it took a good six years to conjure itself.  (This book is evidence that someone born fast, impatient and jumpy can, over many years, learn the art of patience. Lord love a duck, this thing took its own sweet time.)

The final version was written with a little wooden cricket, a poem (Spring and Fall, to a Young Child), and the film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are” propped next to me on the table. Since I long ago trained myself out of both superstition and muse-invoking rituals, you know it had to be a tough slog.

For the inside scoop on the process, please click here.

I will be touring around this fall, giving readings and doing signings, and I would truly love to meet any of you who can make any of the dates. Here they are so far, and I’ll update as necessary.

Sunday, August 30: The Toadstool Bookstore in Peterborough, NH, signing copies, 10 am-noon

Sat, October 3 – Northshire Bookstore, Manchester, VT, reading and signing, 4:00 PM

Sun, October 4 – Flying Pig Bookstore, Shelburne, VT, time TBA

Mon, October 5 – Flying Pig school events in Shelburne, VT

Sunday, October 11: Copperfield’s Books, Petaluma, CA, reading and signing, 2 PM

Monday, October 12: Books Inc., San Francisco, school events

Tuesday, October 13: Book Passage, San Francisco, reading, 10 AM, and school event, 12:30 pm

Monday, October 19: Anderson’s Bookstore, Chicago, reading and signing, 7:00 PM

Tuesday, October 20: The Bookstall, Chicago, school events, morning and afternoon

Friday, October 23: Whale of a Tale, Los Angeles, school events, morning and afternoon

Saturday, October 24: Southern California Independent Booksellers Association conference, North Hollywood, 6 pm appearance

Sunday, November 1: Westport Public Library, Westport, CT, I’m giving a talk, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer,” to kick off National Novel Writing Month, 2-3 pm

Poem of the Week, by Denise Levertov

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At a dinner party the other night some friends asked why my mother, born and raised in Manhattan, had lived her entire adult life in the rural foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. I told them she had always wanted to live in the country, that she had spent childhood summers at a camp where her mother had a job. Like my mother, I’m both country and city, but when things get too worrisome I recite poems like this one to myself. Which might mean that at some level, country wins out.

A Reward
–  Denise Levertov

Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall-the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me, settled
just offshore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.

​

For more information on Denise Levertov, please click here.