A Poem for a Thursday #113

Anne Stevenson was a British-American poet and writer. She was born in England but her family moved to New Haven, CT when she was a baby. Stevenson planned to be a musician but while she was attending the University of Michigan she started to lose her hearing. She decided to be a writer instead. Stevenson returned to the UK where she lived the rest of her life until she died in September of 2020. She wrote many volumes of poetry, biographies of Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop, and several volumes of essays. Stevenson also helped start The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye.

"You have to inhabit poetry
if you want to make it."

And what's "to inhabit?"

To be in the habit of, to wear
words, sitting in the plainest light,
in the silk of the morning, in the shoe of night;
a feeling bare and frondish in surprising air;
familiar...rare.

And what's "to make?"

To be and to become words' passing
weather; to serve a girl on terrible terms,
embark on  voyages over voices,
evade the ego-hill, the misery-well,
the siren hiss of publish, success, publish
success, success, successs.

And why inhabit, make, inherit poetry?

Oh, it's the shared comedy of the worst
blessed: the sound leading the hand;
a wordlife running from mind to mind
through the washed rooms of the simple senses;
one of those haunted, undefendable, unpoetic
crosses we have to find.

Making Poetry
Anne Stevenson