Poets Corner
Poet’s Corner is our new column devoted to poetry; a point of refuge in the online world where those who believe in the transformative power of language can come for contemplation and renewal. In pondering a name for this column, we remembered Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, and, in NYC, St. John of the Divine Cathedral’s American Poets Corner. These sacred spaces in the physical world offer a palpable retreat from the bustle of the everyday; they are places where silence and only the most luminous and considered of words hold sway. We are drawn to this connection because we believe poetry can be a kind of sacred vocation as well as a contemplative encounter.
Trying to Listen, Learning to Speak
If someone listens, deeply, you’ve been heard, which helps you absorb it, and you can lay it at the feet of the right god. —…
A Rumination on Images, Loss, and the Strange Comfort of Silence
A few weeks ago, a cousin sent me a photograph from the memorial dinner we had held after my father died, celebrating his life. It’s…
Lucie Brock-Broido’s Giraffe
Not long after I learned that one of my most fiercely-adored poets, Lucie Brock-Broido, had died at the age of only 61, I read one…
A Light Exists in Spring
A Light exists in Spring Not present on the Year At any other period – When March is scarcely here – Emily Dickinson This…
Mind of Winter
During these slow, cold winter months, the raw quickenings of Spring that I look so forward to each year can begin to seem more like…
Walking the Pilgrim’s Path
In her beautiful book entitled, A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write, writer Melissa Pritchard says, “Many of the tenets of sainthood are also…