For journaling club yesterday, I wanted to find a poem that would serve as both a meditation and a prompt. I thought about “Praise the Rain” by Joy Harjo, which I’ve transcribed and which Adam wrote about the other day, but I wanted something I hadn’t worked over quite as much. I scanned our poetry shelves, I looked through old poem packets I’d put together for teaching, nothing struck me. I figured I’d try to find something new, and thought the Poetry Foundation might have some cool Poetry Month content. I went to their homepage, which I’ve probably never done before. I mean who really goes to homepages anymore?
On the homepage, I clicked on a poem called “The Singers Change, The Music Goes On” by Linda Gregg, and really liked it. I saw underneath the poem that it was part of a “folio” on Linda Gregg in the April issue of Poetry, but I didn’t click into that. Instead, I googled Eurydice, who’s mentioned in the poem. I wanted to be sure I had her story straight before I read the poem aloud to people.
This got me to thinking about Persephone, since yesterday really felt like spring after a hard winter, like Persephone back from the underworld, so then I googled poems about Persephone. And that took me right back to the Linda Gregg folio in Poetry! Her Persephone poem is really interesting, the way it has her “ordinary again” in the land of the living but “longing / after the dear mystery of owls in that different night.” It wasn’t quite right for journaling club, but it prompted me right then to read everything in the folio, which comprises 15 poems by Gregg and essays by Sophie Cabot Black and the folio curator, David Semanki.
As I read, I transcribed three of the poems. What a joy it is to encounter a new (to me) poet! On a homepage! How unlikely.
I was spoiled for choices of which poem to read as a meditation and prompt for journaling club. These are the kind of poems that comprehend so much, and it was not surprising to me to read that Gregg spent “four months in the desert without speaking” and called herself an “intermediary.” As she said in an essay that Black quotes in her tribute:
“To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.”
At the same time, there’s mischief in the poems. There’s an angle. The commitment to precision in Gregg’s lines is matched by unwillingness to be pinned down. There’s nothing dour. Sacred, but not hallowed.
I ended up choosing “Praising Spring” for journaling club. Here’s some lines I love in there:
I love that she chooses a doe instead of a fawn, which we’d more commonly think of as growing. This poem, and Harjo’s poem, are a needed rejoinder to the dully optimistic “April showers bring May flowers.” Rain brings rain, and everything grows all night and “Violets lift to the rain.”
In April, it’s April.