Breakfast Poetry

Anne Marie reads Marie Ponsot's poem Discovery. 

Clare Sullivan is a Professor of Spanish at the University of Louisville, and translates the poetry of Natalia Toledo, a Zapotec poet from the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Clare fell in love with the Spanish language growing up in Chicago, and became a student of literature and Spanish in her graduate studies. As a translator, Clare listens to the weaving of sounds and rhythms as she strives to maintain the playfulness, beauty, and complexities of Natalia’s poetry. In our conversation, we explore the many ways language is a reflection of culture and how poetry is a vessel for the sounds of tradition and evolution.

A full reading of the poet Jorie Graham's Self-Portrait as the Gesture Between Them: "The gesture like a fruit torn from a limb, torn swiftly...The rip in the fabric where the action begins, the opening of the narrow passage...But what else could they have done, these two, sick of beginning, revolving in place like a thing seen...as the apple builds inside the limb, as rain builds in the atmosphere, as the lateness accumulates until it finally is, as the meaning of the story builds...scribbling at the edges of her body until it must be told...so that she had to turn and touch him to give it away...a new direction, an offshoot, the limb going on elsewhere, and liking that error, a feeling of being capable because an error, of being wrong perhaps altogether wrong...and loving that error...that break from perfection...out of nowhere to share the day." - Jorie Graham. 

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core..."

"If we could, like the trees, practice dying, do it every year just as something we do...Whatever the trees know when they stand undone, surprisingly intricate, we need to know also so we cal allow that last thing to happen to us as if it were only any ordinary thing..." from Grace Butcher's poem, Learning from Trees.

"...Does all grow slowly nameless in your mouth? Where words once were, discoveries flow, set free from the fruit's flesh, amazed...O knowing, feeling, happiness--, immense!" This morning's poetry reading is Rilke's Sonnet to Orpheus, 13. A poem for the ripe fruit of autumn. Feel, taste, grow clear, awake, and be transparent. 

"...In the newborn orchard each morning I ponder. And sense the vibration of bonds that wed me to the great host of invisible stars, to the sunken moon, to the sun whose laughter flushes the hill with crimson..." from Denise Levertov's poem "Are We Ruled by the Wind?"

Today's daily poetry reading is from the Sufi poet Kabir, translated by Robert Bly. "The Guest is inside you, and also inside me...inside love there is more joy than we know of...Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail..."

"...I did not see Life was About to change, as it does, When odd magic appears: There was No music Yet..." Music: As Time Goes By, Stephane Grappelli. 

"...listen: hang on keep your silence until the words ripen in you, look at and caress things the hands know, their is a blind wisdom..."