Maya C. Popa

Mary Oliver's Augusts Writing about a month across a lifetime

Yesterday’s newsletter on Mary Oliver’s Augusts:

Mary Oliver's Augusts Writing about a month across a lifetime

Yesterday’s newsletter on Mary Oliver’s Augusts:

Fire and Ice:

Fire and Ice:

‪Thank you, I am grateful to @mayacpopa.bsky.social & @poetryfoundation.bsky.social for this tender insight into life & work more of us should know.‬

Join us tomorrow!

Join us tomorrow!

Friends, I wrote a piece on poet Laura Gilpin, who died of glioblastoma in 2006.

She is best known for “The Two-Headed Calf.”

With gratitude to the Poetry Foundation for allowing me to try to restore this remarkable healthcare practitioner/poet’s legacy.

www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/170...

Algis Valiunas in his review of Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder (2008): “Poetry needs science, which lifts the veil from nature, and science needs poetry, which elaborates for public appreciation the beauty of the secrets that have been unveiled.”

Dear Life By Maya C. Popa I can’t undo all I have done unto myself, what I have let an appetite for love do to me. I have wanted all the world, its beauties and its injuries; some days, I think that is punishment enough. Often, I received more than I’d asked, which is how this works—you fish in open water ready to be wounded on what you reel in. Throwing it back was a nightmare. Throwing it back and seeing my own face as it disappeared into the dark water. Catching my tongue suddenly on metal, spitting the hook into my open palm. Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly. Would you loosen the line—you’ll listen if   I ask you, if   you are the sort of  life I think you are.

Maya C. Popa, from “Spring”, Wound Is the Origin of Wonder

🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

— Muriel Rukeyeser

Thanks so much for sharing this, Erik!

Thank you so much for reading.

Thank you for reading!

NO WAY! And hiiiiiiiiiiiii. Thank you so much for reading. x

So glad! Hope you enjoy the other poems excerpted.

So glad you and that poem found each other and very sorry for your loss. x

🙏🏻

Thanks so much, Rick!

That was the hope. But so nice to hear this. Sincere thanks. x

Maya C. Popa writing eloquently and very informatively about the wonderful Laura Gilpin.

Thank you so much!

Friends, I wrote a piece on poet Laura Gilpin, who died of glioblastoma in 2006.

She is best known for “The Two-Headed Calf.”

With gratitude to the Poetry Foundation for allowing me to try to restore this remarkable healthcare practitioner/poet’s legacy.

www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/170...

Want to study with @alinaetc.bsky.social? Of course, you do!

Can't WAIT for this session. I've been eyeing it on my calendar for months. What a mind.

Join us!

www.mayacpopa.com/onlineclasse...

In 2015, I wrote a long poem called “Uranium in English” about the gun crisis in the US. I was re-reading it this morning with the same impossible heaviness I felt as I was writing it. Some excerpts:

St. Thomas Aquinas argued that poets and philosophers “are alike in being big with wonder.” Lucille Clifton remarked that “poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.”

Part of what drives us to the page as poets is the pleasure of capturing in language what seems bent on eluding it.