Rebecca Foust | Women's Voices For Change- Part 2

Rebecca Foust was the 2017-18 Poet Laureate of Marin County. Her fifth book, “Paradise Drive,” won the 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry and was reviewed in the Georgia Review, Hudson Review, Huffington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Review of Books, and elsewhere. Recognitions include the 2015 American Literary Review Award for Fiction, the 2015 James Hearst Poetry Prize, the 2014 Constance Rook Creative Nonfiction Award, and fellowships from the Frost Place, MacDowell Colony, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and West Chester Poetry Conference. “Paradise Drive” can be ordered at www.press53.com. For more information visit rebeccafoust.com.

Poetry

Maria Popova’s “Brain Pickings” Column on
Pablo Neruda’s “Keeping Quiet”

By Rebecca Foust

In some ways, Pablo Neruda’s poem almost seems to anticipate the situation the world finds itself in now.

Poetry

“Yes,” by Denise Duhamel

By Rebecca Foust

Reading “Yes,” we get a real sense of commitment to making a marriage work and, maybe more importantly, of the sense that this is not just a tedious chore. Real affection, and humor, lighten the touch here.

Poetry

“Tennessee June,” by Jorie Graham

By Rebecca Foust

The poem makes its political point lightly, touching on it and then moving immediately into a lyricism that steers the poem back into more personal—and universal—concerns.

Poetry

Review: Ledger by Jane Hirshfield

By Rebecca Foust

Ledger’s poems take stock of the losses—both personal to this speaker and in the larger sense of our world’s ever-diminishing resources and species—and do so with a mounting sense of crisis.

Poetry

“Small Kindnesses,” by Danusha Laméris

By Rebecca Foust

Maybe the best way we can all help now is to stay calm and focused on the goal of emerging from seclusion into a healthier climate in a few weeks or months. And, when we do go out or otherwise interact with others, to be kind and to treat everyone with an extra level of compassion and respect. That’s why “Small Kindnesses” is an important poem to feature this week.

Poetry

Rachel Hadas: “Love and Dread”

By Rebecca Foust

Today’s poem does not call for an eradication of dread, though it does lament its existence. Dread plays a necessary role in human life, and the poem seems to acknowledge it as the yin to love’s yang, the dark to the light side of the moon, despair’s counterpart to hope.

Poetry

Jane Hirshfield: “Today, When I Could Do Nothing”

By Rebecca Foust

In the poem, the speaker finds the confines of her small shelter-in-place space invaded by a visitor in the form of—an ant. But Jane Hirshfield takes the opposite view, welcoming the tiny creature into her home and then rescuing it to release it again outside.

Poetry

Athena Kildegaard:
“a safe, well-defined, acceptable unknown”

By Rebecca Foust

In the poem’s last lines, “evidence” is a crucial word. Seeking “a safe, well-defined, acceptable unknown,” perhaps, we look for scientific validation of the mystery, a concept fundamentally not susceptible to this kind of metric.

Poetry

Martha Silano: “When I begin to dig”

By Rebecca Foust

“When I begin to dig” begins with what sparked the poem: Martha Silano’s discovery that the English word “verse” derives from Latin for “to turn,” itself derived from the action of a plow’s turn at the end of a furrow during field cultivation.

Health

“After Being Asked if I Write the ‘Occasional Poem’” by Kimiko Hahn

By Rebecca Foust

This is an invocation to witness and to acknowledge our shared responsibility for what happened to a little girl seeking refuge and who died days after entering US custody.

Poetry

“litany” and “Inevitable” by Mahogany Browne

By Rebecca Foust

“litany” opens with a bold and simple statement of identity—“today i am a black woman in America”—then moves into an ironic “lullaby” about what that means for too many such women.

Poetry

Lucille Clifton: “blessing the boats,” “homage to my hips,” and “won’t you celebrate with me”

By Rebecca Foust

These three Lucille Clifton poems are ones I love for their fresh, fierce, and sassy voice; compression; deceptively simple diction; rejection of punctuation and other conventions; humor and honesty; and above all, their joyous message of female empowerment, agency, and strength.

Poetry

Georgia Johnson Douglas: “Black Woman,” “Foredoom,” and “The Heart of a Woman”

By Rebecca Foust

In this week’s poems, the fixed forms and elevated diction sound archaic to contemporary ears, but their ideas were revolutionary in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s time and remain relevant today.

Poetry

“Song for my Daughter” and “Song for my Son,”
by Emily Pérez

By Rebecca Foust

These poems show how a mother’s fear for her daughter is often the flip side of her fear for and of her son, of what he as a representative of his gender might do. How do we negotiate this very difficult terrain?

Poetry

“Anniversary Declaration,” by Amanda Moore

By Rebecca Foust

I had fun subverting the idea of an "Anniversary Declaration," which one might assume will be momentous and romantic, by addressing the dailiness and occasional strife that can accompany a long marriage, no matter how happy it is.

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