www.annehardingwoodworth.com
Cover photo by Sheila
Myers
© 2002 Anne Harding
Woodworth, all rights reserved. Contact publisher
for re-print possibility |
from the poem,
"The Mushroom Papers"
1
Speed measures a cell's journey
and when it comes to mushrooms
acceleration overwhelms
with sounds of birthing and dying,
and what it's like to live through the night.
Mushrooms race each other
to be over with and begin again, which
is the familiarity of the forest floor.
2
They talk, too,
expose themselves with abandon
like strangers on a bus.
They don't have a lot of time to think
or get acquainted with anyone
and that gets some of them into trouble,
especially the poisonous ones
whose self-centering bursts in chaos.
The innocuous ones, most of them,
absorb fast under pressure.
They understand
how quickly the end comes
and concern themselves with behavior,
philosophy, substance, and wit.
They are pleasantly
self-contained
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more) |
“These
are poems that speak from a powerful sense of how ancient and ever-new the
earth is and how variously blessed we are to live on it.
Anne Harding Woodworth's poems celebrate the taut thrill of being,
even as they recognize its hard incongruities.”
–
Baron Wormser
(read more reviews)
AUBADE
To a poem about to be published
We wake up to the rose-and-laughter sun
magnanimous
toward you and me about to part,
unfamiliar as he is with any dark at all.
You are what I would say, or did I say it?--
That's how hard it is
to let you go your way.
We touched each other
through a frightening night. I heard
your sounds, replaced them here and there
with color, salve, but lightless we could barely
see at times. My fingers smoothed your throat.
You rhymed my spine, I timed your feet
that twitched in sleep of running scenes.
You breathed a quickening to the turn,
the voltage burn of urgency. I told you
all I could, you me, the one we were,
no space between by dawn.
Now separately among the knives
of urban screech and rural scythes we go,
among the men in fancy shoes or overalls,
women with diplomas on their walls. They’ll
find our lips no more than pink cliché. They’ll
leave us out and close the door,
and one--just one--might say
"how nice, this metaphor."
Goodbye. The sun is high.
I'm turning south,
and should we see each other later on,
let's listen to the breezes in the gingko leaves,
though you and I shall never sleep
side by side again till dawn.
Anne Harding Woodworth
". . . the eagles flew and flew until they met here
at the centerpoint of land and sea: Delphi. . . . those eagles are always there;
and moreover it seems they always were." -from a 1985 guidebook on Greece
Cover Photo
by Brad Iverson
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a review!
About
Anne Harding Woodworth
|
|
THE STORYTELLER TELLS HIMSELF
Some say my name
comes from the word Ethiop.
Yes, I know they say
many things about me.
I say I'm as Greek
as the olives I eat
as Greek as the horta greens I pick
on the Hill of the Nymphs
across from the Acropolis.
Unlike the wolf, I do not eat meat.
Unlike the lion, I do not keep a lioness.
My hair brownish-black and long
blends into my graying beard
as if a ring of twisted drapery-fringe
surrounds and partially shields
my face, which some say is ugly.
I say it has, well,
pleasant mystery about it
necessary in my line of work.
A small spot darker than my skin
clings to my dimming right eye
where a dog bit me, or so they say.
I was born in Thrace with two cloth pouches
hanging from my neck. The red one in back
held all my bad traits. I couldn't see it
though I always doubted it was very full.
The blue one in front was bulging
with everyone else's flaws, which
I thought were as clear
as the night sky over Mt. Pendeli.
Some say I'm a slave
belonging to the house of Iadmon.
I say I walk freely in my world.
Like all trapped creatures
I revise the truth to survive
the road I'm on.
My roads are dust. My limp
begets quick coin, procures
tasty items at a discount
salacious ones, too.
Once I was behind a red-lipped woman
in the agora, whose thick wood soles
cut the words "follow me" in the dust.
Given to morals, I'll say only this:
the follower shall be first.
I am on my way to Delphi,
source of life
and my own feet draw in dust
the direction in which I travel.
~From
“Aesop’s Eagles”
© 2001 Anne Harding
Woodworth, all rights reserved. Contact publisher
for re-print possibility |
Praise for Aesop's Eagles and Poems from the Road
and Anne Harding Woodworth's Poetry
“What is there about
safely putting our poems between two covers and letting them go out into the
world? Bringing to completion the
work we’ve been doing? . . . And [this] book is just the right size for
poetry. . . .I love the Aesop poems. That
rich context provides drama and landscape.
They are beautifully done.”
Myra
Sklarew, poet (Lithuania, New and Selected Poems) and Professor, American
University
“There is such a skilled
narrative flow, but also a vivid sensual sense of place . . . I got a whole life
– and lives of creatures to contend with . . . In the second part, the love
poems or lost love poems [like the] fables [are] deceptively simple but
profound. There is so much surprise
here of language and insight – in ‘The Walk’ for instance, the
levels–all of a sudden–go POW. ‘Having
to breathe / in a way that others don’t’ begins to mean all differentness,
whether of pain that sets us apart or our human-ness, which sets us apart from
life-enhancing creatures.”
Suzanne
E. Berger (Horizontal Woman: The Story of a Body in Exile)
“I enjoyed A’s E.
My favorite is ‘Declension’ – love the wordplay & humor in the
midst of serious. There are lots of
wonderful things in this Aesop of [Woodworth’s] – very rich in
imagining.”
Ellen
Doré Watson, poet (Ladder Music and We Live in Bodies) and
Director of Smith College Poetry Center.
“In Aesop’s Eagles,
Aesop is nominally the star, though we learn most about the mysterious,
shape-shifting freed-slave from a dog that bit him when he was a baby: ‘not a
pretty baby / draped in layers of muslin / with an old man face.’
The dog bites the baby and, stunned, reports,
The
baby doesn’t cry.
Instead, he puts his tiny hand
under my chin. I have no
control over what happens next.
I am licking the wound.
“ I love this tiny moment
– somehow I imagine that this is where Aesop confers speech to the animal;
biting him, the dog gets caught in his spell and is transformed into a poet, a
storyteller himself. This is the
generosity of Anne’s poetry – everyone and everything is given voice, and
the poet (whose imagination in fact fires an entire universe) appears to just
step aside and let it happen.”
Libbie Rifkin, author of Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American
Avant-Garde and Poetry Coordinator, Folger Shakespeare Library