This is Episode 115 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, 'We Are All Writing God's Poem'", by Barbara Crooker.
Barbara Crooker is an American poet who has published eight collcetions, most recently Some Glad Morning in 2019.
One of the things that jumps out for me in this poem is the invisible threads that connect writers to writers to writers, all those documenters of the small moments of the world around us. The title references a line spoken by the poet Anne Sexton, "We are all writing God’s poem", which Sexton told to Erica Jong, herself a poet, who mentioned it in a Guardian newspaper article in the year 2000.
And Crooker’s poem also mentions reading Li Po, a Chinese poet of the 8th century, while at the same time drawing resonance from driving, listening to the radio, passing tractors along the road.
Writing about this poem, Parker Palmer said that Crooker “helps us see that, amid the seemingly random events of life, paying attention allows us to create patterns of meaning — making a strange kind of sense out of our experience while honoring its complexity.”
You can read the poem here.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com