Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence

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Table of Contents

Part One
Excerpts from a June Journal
Beans
June 1, 1991: Sleeping Late
June 16, 1991: Final Foal
Journal Entry, PoBiz, Texas
Notes from My Journal, Kyoto, December 1984

Part Two
Interstices
Swimming and Writing
Motherhood and Poetics
October 4, 1995
For Anne at Passover
Recitations
First Loves

Part Three
An Appreciation of Marianne Moore's Selected Letters
This Curious Silent Unrepresented Life
Josephine Jacobsen
Back to the Fairground: Mona Van Duyn
A Postcard from the Volcano
Essay on Robert Frost

Part Four
Trochee, Trimeter, and the MRI: On A Shropshire Lad
Gymnastics: The Villanelle
A Way of Staying Sane
Word for Word: "Poem for My Son"
Scrubbed Up and Sent to School

Part Five
Keynote Address, PEN-New England, April 11, 1999
Premonitory Shiver
Two Junes

Part Six
Interview

from an interview with Enid Shomer

ES: I know that there are many poets whose work you admire, but who has exerted the most influence on you?

MK: Auden, unquestionably. Almost everything I know how to do with the line, I learned from absorbing Auden.

ES: You never met him?

MK: No. I probably attended a dozen readings he gave, in and around Boston, in his carpet slippers. I worshipped him from afar. Today, it must seem a strange influence, and Anglo-American male. You'd expect I would say--I don't know--but some woman role model. There really was no one at the time.

ES: Marianne Moore?

MK: Hardly. She was inimitable, in the firest sense of that word. And Elizabeth Bishop was just too distant and too classical. But when I was sixteen, I adored Edna St. Vincent Millay; I could say lots of her sonnets by heart, and that was all to the good. Auden exerted an intellectual and visceral influence on me, though, metrically, in terms of rhyme and scansion, and his ability to compress those gifts into images, to make a metaphor of a thought: "In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark."