Robert Bly/ Poetry 180

Poetry 180 is a website established by Billy Collins, a wonderful current poet and former US Poet Laureate. It offers a poem every day to high school students, similar to what this blog is trying to accomplish. These poems are generally brief and relevant to the lives of young people. It provides a wonderful entrance to a lifetime of enjoying poetry. Please check out the website and perhaps you'd like to sign up to have the poems shared with you each day. (Let me know if you do sign up for this- extra credit!!)

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/

Below is a poem by Robert Bly, another Poet Laureate and a new favorite of mine. I love this poem because it is a simple snapshot of a feeling, a moment. It indicates to us that our own lives are poetry, if we only seek to view them that way.

Today's is a short poem about the joy of being alone. (It should be read twice.) Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter Robert Bly It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted. The only things moving are swirls of snow. As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron. There is a privacy I love in this snowy night. Driving around, I will waste more time. from Silence in the Snowy Fields, 1953 Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn. Copyright 1962 by Robert Bly. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission

Another good one by Robert Bly:

Three Kinds of Pleasures

I

Sometimes, riding in a car, in Wisconsin

Or Illinois, you notice those dark telephone poles

One by one lift themselves out of the fence line

And slowly leap on the gray sky—

And past them, the snowy fields.

 

II

The darkness drifts down like snow on the picked cornfields

In Wisconsin: and on these black trees

Scattered, one by one,

Through the winter fields—

We see stiff weeds and brownish stubble,

And white snow left now only in the wheeltracks of the combine.

 

III

It is a pleasure, also, to be driving

Toward Chicago, near dark,

And see the lights in the barns.

The bare trees more dignified than ever,

Like a fierce man on his deathbed,

And the ditches along the road half full of a private snow.

Can you tell I'm thinking of snow?!