First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems
Sophie Cabot Black on Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood”
So many roads to poetry: the first word, the first symmetry of a nursery rhyme, first loved fragment of music. The first grip of allegory, the first great ending, first misheard lyric: how are these not all pieces of poetry? read more…
At Length Magazine: Short Takes on Long Poems
Sophie Cabot Black on Louise Gluck’s “The Wild Iris”
Maybe any successful book of poems can be read as one long poem: forged of a singular piece. Cut from the same heart, same sensibility. Maybe you fall deeper in love with those who also work from the inside out. It’s more distinctively organic; a larger, interior momentum builds. read more…
Poetry Society of America: Reading in the Dark
Sophie Cabot Black on Mark Strand’s “Black Sea”
What we turn to in these never-before and ever-shifting times, may or may not last. When we go back to the poems that have kept us awake to what we needed to remember, to see if they still hold, what we believe we need does not always work. The sad but good news is that we move on. Some poems stay by your side, some do not. Mark Strand for me is someone who in the simplest way asks the heart to hold both the dark and the light, as, after all, you cannot know one without the other. read more…
Poetry Magazine: She Sang of Seeing
Sophie Cabot Black on Linda Gregg’s poetry
I first encountered Linda Gregg’s poems in a workshop at Columbia University in 1982. A fellow student slipped me a folded note with the words too bright to see scrawled inside. After class he handed over a copy of the slim, blue book by that name—Linda’s debut, recently published by Graywolf Press. The collection was like nothing I’d ever encountered: luminous and singular, it sang of seeing. read more…