Concerning the Meaning Molecule in Poetry

By Brenda HillmanJune 15, 2019

Concerning the Meaning Molecule in Poetry

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

 

¤


Brenda Hillman is the author of 10 collections of poetry. The most recent is Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days.

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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