"An Axe for the Frozen Sea" by Ben Palpant

Occasionally, you come across a book that feels like old home week, like you’ve returned to your college alma mater and almost nothing has changed. Poet and writer Ben Palpant has written a book just like that. 

The book is An Axe for the Frozen Sea: Conversations with poets about what matters most. Over the course of many months, Palpant interviewed 17 poets. He talked to them about what they write, why they write, how they view poetry (their own and others’), and generally focusing on the question most poets likely ask themselves throughout their writing careers: Why poetry?

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

A Seeming Stillness – poem by David Whyte.

 

“The Restoration” and “Quo Vadis?” – poems by Brian Yapko at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Estuary – poem by Luci Shaw at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Pansies – poem by Kate Seymour MacLean at Every Day Poems.

 

“The Waste Land,” poem by T.S. Eliot – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Seamus Heaney

I’ve been reading Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (1999), and simultaneously reading Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2010). This wasn’t actually planned, but both books had been sitting on my shelf and it seemed to make sense to read them together.

What is particularly helpful is that O’Driscoll has arranged the interviews to cover some introductory subjects and then each one of Heaney’s collections, and Heaney’s volume pulls selected poems from the volumes through 1996. So I can read the poems and then read the interview covering the volume the poem’s appeared in.

The interviews occurred over a period of years. Most were done by letter and email. Two were actually broadcast programs taped and later transcribed. All of them describe what influenced Heaney, how he put the collections together, and what all of this work came to mean over time.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetspeakPoetry.