SHORT POEMS AND SPIN-OFFS: EMILY AND THE EXPERIENCE OF SURPRISE
by Denise Levertov
Page 2
I'm not going to inflict a dashless reading upon that poem. I'm going to read first from some typescripts, and then from some poems from a couple of my books. And a lot of the poems that I've been writing since my last book are rather long. I've been writing a sequence of poems, each one of which is fairly long, about Lady Julian of Norwich, the English medieval mystic, and some other poems which tend to run to length. Because Emily's poems didn't run to great length, I thought I would try to choose short poems to read today. And I have been writing short poems too, so I selected from the short ones. I'm not going to read them in any particular order. In other words, what I'll be reading first are all since my last book but they're not being read in chronological order, but more or less haphazard.
AN ESTRANGEMENT
I have seen days now.
to stand blue skinned in their bones
