Articles About First Lines :: Page 2

• First Lines — October, catching fire

  By Audrey HackettOctober 25, 2019

  

  Not all poems marvel or praise. Some embrace the bleakness — as this month’s poem by MJ White does, beautifully.

• First Lines — A wisdom poem

  By Audrey HackettOctober 10, 2019

  

  “There is an impassable gap ….” A poem from villager Jim Malarkey contemplates our strangeness to each other. Intimacy as well as violence grows in that “gap.”

• First Lines — ‘While tottering …’

  By Audrey HackettSeptember 7, 2019

  

  In this month’s poem, villager Janeal Turnbull Ravndal meditates on marriage, aging and the loss of balance, leading to new forms of grace.

• First Lines — The world of objects

  By Audrey HackettAugust 1, 2019

  

  What do objects want? This month’s poem by Reilly Dixon enters the world of objects.

• First Lines — Of memory, hiding and identity

  By Audrey HackettJuly 17, 2019

  

  What happens to those who came before us also happens to us. In a poem by villager Maxine Skuba, world history and personal history touch hands.

• First Lines — The magic of small forms

  By Audrey HackettJune 8, 2019

  

  This month’s poems come from longtime villager Rubin Battino, who has been writing three-line poems for decades. “We hit it off,” he said of the short form, his own adaptation of haiku.

• First Lines — The hide and seek of happiness

  By Audrey HackettMay 1, 2019

  

  “There’s just no accounting for happiness,” begins a poem I love by Jane Kenyon. Happiness in this poem is a gift, a grace, as it seems to be in this month’s poem from musician Carl Schumacher.

• First Lines — The season of firsts

  By Audrey HackettMarch 14, 2019

  

  Spring. We become aware of it not just by the calendar, but more viscerally by signs. By firsts, as in this poem by local writer and teacher Ed Davis.

• First Lines — The freedom of poems

  By Audrey HackettFebruary 28, 2019

  

  There is enormous freedom in a poem. It is the same freedom found within the human mind. This month, a poem, or a spacious poem-prayer, by villager Moriel Rothman-Zecher.

• First Lines — In memoriam: Mary Oliver

  By Audrey HackettJanuary 31, 2019

  

  Mary Oliver is the lovely, lambent consciousness of every poem she wrote in praise of heron and hawk, windflower and black oak, lightning and first snow. It is she who went out into the world, she who scribbled notes.