Two Poets I Love

    The Monosyllable     by Josephine Jacobsen

One day

she fell

in love with its

heft and speed.

Tough, lean,

fast as light

slow

as a cloud.

It took care

of rain, short

noon, long dark.

It had rough kin;

did not stall.

With it, she said,

I may,

if I can,

sleep; since I must,

die.

Some say,

rise.

Then, some words on poetry by Jane Hirschfield:

 

A poem’s music affects us whether or not we make it conscious; still, to study sound’s workings reawakens bother ear and poem. Generalization cannot teach this alertness. It is learned only by saying one poem at a time aloud, completely. Voicing it repeatedly feeling its weights and measures sounding its vowels; noticing where in the body each syllable comes to rest; tasting the consonant’ motion through lips and tongue…”  (9)

Jane Hirschfield   from “Poetry and the Mind of Concentration” in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry