This is plenty. This is more than enough.

[moireach]

I just wrote a ridiculous and unnecessarily long email about poetry to an undergraduate professor and it's so rare that I write anything lately that's not work-related, I thought perhaps I should save it somewhere for posterity.  (Also: POETRY!  Oh yeah!  That's that thing I love!)

Comments

[interminable]

I'm not sure what you should do, but I thought I would mention a couple of things: In 2005, my grandmother was in the hospital. I was staying in her apartment in JP, making twice-daily trips to see her, and writing nightly updates to the rest of the family with what the doctors told me. I felt so alone there, staying in her apartment without her, and I was so afraid that she would never come back. My grandmother was the adult I looked up to most in the world. You posted What the Living Do, and I remember sitting on my little fold-away cot in the entryway, reading it out loud over and over. That poem will always mean that for me now.

Later that year, I fell in love. It was long distance, at least at first, and we had to find our own ways to feel close. I recorded myself reading The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy, which I also discovered through you, and sent it to her. I was so nervous: I think I re-recorded it at least ten times trying to get it right. Afterwards, she told me she could hear my breathing, like I was really right there. That image, of her sitting in the dark with headphones on, listening for my breath between the lines, remains one of the most erotic things I can imagine. In the intervening nine years we became a couple and then we became not a couple and finally we became friends, but I will never in my life walk through the drizzle of Portland without reminiscing.

When I first came to Iceland, I was depressed and alone and unsure of where I was going in the world. But it was April, and the daily poems helped. I found myself going back through the archives and reading a few to myself each day. I particularly remember Entry, by Lisa Sewell becoming a kind of mantra. " Make me brave enough; to see my life as one more version of the human"

I have never loved anyone without sending them at least one poem from your archives.

[moireach]

This is hands down the best LJ comment I've ever received. Gonna save it forever. (Is there any connection like loving the same piece of writing? I don't think so.) I don't even know what to say. Except thank you thank you. (And it's been way too long since I read that Lisa Sewell poem.)

Also now I'm thinking of William Carlos Williams:

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.