Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence Selected Poems, 1965-2000

Table of Contents Part One Excerpts from a June Journal Beans June 1, 1991: Sleeping Late June 16, 1991: Final Foal Journal Entry, PoBiz, Texas Notes from My Journal, Kyoto, December 1984 Part Two Interstices Swimming and Writing Motherhood and Poetics October 4, 1995 For Anne at Passover Recitations First Loves Part Three An Appreciation of Marianne Moore's Selected Letters This Curious Silent Unrepresented Life Josephine Jacobsen Back to the Fairground: Mona Van Duyn A Postcard from the Volcano Essay on Robert Frost Part Four Trochee, Trimeter, and the MRI: On A Shropshire Lad Gymnastics: The Villanelle A Way of Staying Sane Word for Word: "Poem for My Son" Scrubbed Up and Sent to School Part Five Keynote Address, PEN-New England, April 11, 1999 Premonitory Shiver Two Junes Part Six Interview from an interview with Enid Shomer ES: I know that there are many poets whose work you admire, but who has exerted the most influence on you? MK: Auden, unquestionably. Almost everything I know how to do with the line, I learned from absorbing Auden. ES: You never met him? MK: No. I probably attended a dozen readings he gave, in and around Boston, in his carpet slippers. I worshipped him from afar. Today, it must seem a strange influence, and Anglo-American male. You'd expect I would say--I don't know--but some woman role model. There really was no one at the time. ES: Marianne Moore? MK: Hardly. She was inimitable, in the firest sense of that word. And Elizabeth Bishop was just too distant and too classical. But when I was sixteen, I adored Edna St. Vincent Millay; I could say lots of her sonnets by heart, and that was all to the good. Auden exerted an intellectual and visceral influence on me, though, metrically, in terms of rhyme and scansion, and his ability to compress those gifts into images, to make a metaphor of a thought: "In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark."Creeley, Robert is the author of 'Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence Selected Poems, 1965-2000' with ISBN 9781566891134 and ISBN 1566891132.