DiaBLOGue

When I was in my early teens—it seems like I was no older than fourteen—I received a special gift from my grandparents. They knew I liked to read. In fact, they knew that I read a lot. I was a regular patron of the local library, often rushing through two or three books on a long summer day.

In his novella, A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean describes a conversation with his father, who knows of Norman’s desire to write. “You like to tell true stories, don’t you?” the father asks. “Yes,”…

The epigraph to Emma Lou Thayne’s book Things Happen from Alice Walker reads: “One wants to write poetry that is understood by one’s people.” In the same spirit, I want to write to my people about a poet, one of our own, whose poems I believe stand among the finest. Some of these poems I read when they were published ten or more years ago; one, “Love Song at the End of Summer,” has stayed with me all those intervening years, shaping both my readerly and writerly consciousness with its heartbreaking grace. In order to address what I take to be a crucial ontological issue in lyric poetry, Emma Lou Thayne’s in particular, I want to set up a rubric, and to do that I need to talk about my own studies of, and concerns about, the lyric.