Poets and Poems: Gabrielle Myers and “Go Forth: Lose Yourself into Life”

The end of a relationship with a spouse or partner is like a death – a death of familiarity, a death of structure, a death of how we live our lives and who we share that life with. I’ve never experienced that kind of loss, but I’ve seen it happen to close friends and family members.  

Gabrielle Myers experienced that kind of loss, a relationship she ended after “five years of verbal abuse.” She did what many poets do – she turned to writing poetry to understand it, assimilate it, and resolve it –if such a thing can ever truly be resolved. But she did it in a rather unique way, by using the natural landscape around her to structure and explain her poems. And her loss.

 

The result is Go Forth: Lose Yourself into Life, Myers’ fourth collection of poetry. It could also be subtitled with the words she uses to begin her introductory essay: “Begin to Know the World Again from Nothing.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Splendor of the Orient – K.S. Bernstein at Apple Blossoms in a Mournful Wood on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17.

 

August, in Passing – poem by Riyanka Paul.

 

Sonnets in St. Louis: The Life of Sara Teasdale – Zoe Korte at Missouri Historical Society.

 

Poets and Poems: Gabrielle Myers and "Points in the Network"

I love reading big poetry epics and sagas. My idea of a fun time might be reading Beowulf in the J.R.R. Tolkien or Seamus Heaney translations, or even the translation I read in my college textbook, the Norton Anthology of English Literature. (I still have it, more than 50 years later.) Then there’s reading and rereading the stories told in verse form by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, and The Courtship of Miles Standish. 

Epics and sagas are feasts, but a diet exclusively composed of feasts would quickly become boring and meaningless, losing and sense of “special-ness.” The vast majority of what we consume is everyday meals; the vast majority of the poetry I read is what I would call the poetry of the everyday. And few posts excel at the poetry of the everyday like Gabrielle Myers. Consider her new collection, Points in the Network.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Truth Eludes Even Old Men – Tara Isabella Burton at The Free Press on Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

 

Poetry Club Date: True North – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“Down by the Salley Gardens,” poem by William Butler Yeats – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

A Conversation with Jared Carter, Part 1 – Sunil Iyengar at New Verse Review.

 

Taxonomy of Churning – poem by Erin Murphy at Every Day Poems.

Poets and Poems: Gabrielle Myers and "Break Self: Feed"

I read the poems in Break Self: Feed by Gabrielle Myers, and what comes almost immediately to mind ae the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe. I’m reminded of not all of O’Keefe’s paintings, but the ones of flowers and other natural objects that might be what’s being portrayed, and also might be some part of the human anatomy. O’Keefe’s paintings are sensual; so, too, are the poems by Myers. 

This isn’t coincidental or accidental. Myers is too careful of a writer, too deliberate in her choices of words. Her poems intricately combine features of the natural world with humanity, suggesting we are not only closer to nature than we think we are but also a very intimate part of it.

To continue reading, please see my post at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Change in the wind – poem by Kathleen at The Course of Our Seasons.

 

‘Back-Door Pastoral’ and ‘Life’s Lessons’ – poems by C.B. Anderson at Society of Classical Poets.

 

This is Love – poem by Amanda Johnston at Every Day Poems.

 

“Morning Song of Senlin,” poem by Conrad Aiken – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Gabrielle Myers and "Too Many Seeds"

It’s no surprise to find food, nature, and food in nature in the poetry of Gabrielle Myers. She’s an English teacher now, but she worked for years at as a chef. Food is important. The quality of food is important. Her poems are filled, like seeds, with food metaphors. Her recently published first collection, Too Many Seeds, is a veritable feast of images, ideas, questions, and answers about food, nature, and what we do in the short time we have on this planet. 

The 45 poems in the collection take us to picking heirloom tomatoes, searching for fennel pollen, picking figs, examining quality control and the processing line at a dried fruit factory, asking questions about an injured bee, what you see from your window at lunchtime, and watching a hummingbird in an orange tree. She expertly uses the language of food and nature, and food from nature, to weave a consideration of life and what it means.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.