Concerning the Meaning Molecule in Poetry
"Long ago a man told me, If you write poetry / keep your subjects small;" Brenda Hillman's poem "Concerning the Meaning Molecule in Poetry."
By Brenda HillmanJune 15, 2019
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This piece appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: The Occult, No. 22
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Concerning the Meaning Molecule in Poetry
Long ago a man told me, If you write poetry
keep your subjects small;
i was a tiny skinny girl at that point …
Much later, i heard a meaning molecule
in the call of a dove pretending to be an owl in the pine,
a song-speck circling in a thought throughout all time
(like the man said, extremely small!)
traveling from before literature
through the blue centuries until quite recently
when a radiant instance of the unknown
paused our bafflement but kept
that little meaning absolutely elusive, & erotic …
for AC & NS
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LARB Contributor
Brenda Hillman is the author of 10 collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry; and her most recent, Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days. In 2016 she was named Academy of American Poets Chancellor. Among other awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Photo Credit: Robert Hass
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