The gardener poet: Vita Sackville-West

Not yet September and already the garden is strewn with fallen leaves. It has not been quite the summer I had envisioned (long hours reading poetry in the partial shade, sipping chilled chardonnay, listening to water drip endlessly from stone into pool). Too many demands on my time: I work two jobs, seven days a [...]

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1. the two rivers: the Styx and the Spoon

From the beginning I was drawn equally to those two primary streams of early modern poetry, which I tend to think of as the Styx and the Spoon.  I cannot remember quite when or where I was when I encountered either of them for the first time.  The earliest memory of the Styx, river of death, dream and forgetfulness, was in some old book [...]

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. 4. The college above Keith Creek: defending the Romantics

My primary reason for leaving the wilderness was to undertake an in-depth study of poetry and philosophy, something I could not do easily in the woods, at least in the primitive conditions under which I lived.  I needed access to a library and to teachers, and I knew I would benefit by the discipline of a [...]

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11. The river ran red: poetry wars

early skirmishes at Rockford College Almost from the beginning, poetry for me was a matter of contention.  The fight began before I had shown a poem to anyone.  I had read poetry seriously for several years in solitude, then thought to give my reading some structure and weight with a year or two of formal [...]

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