num_pages: 320
description: Table of Contents Part OneExcerpts from a June JournalBeansJune 1, 1991: Sleeping LateJune 16, 1991: Final FoalJournal Entry, PoBiz, TexasNotes from My Journal, Kyoto, December 1984 Part TwoIntersticesSwimming and WritingMotherhood and PoeticsOctober 4, 1995For Anne at PassoverRecitationsFirst Loves Part ThreeAn Appreciation of Marianne Moore's Selected LettersThis Curious Silent Unrepresented LifeJosephine JacobsenBack to the Mona Van DuynA Postcard from the VolcanoEssay on Robert Frost Part FourTrochee, Trimeter, and the On A Shropshire Lad The VillanelleA Way of Staying SaneWord for "Poem for My Son"Scrubbed Up and Sent to School Part FiveKeynote Address, PEN-New England, April 11, 1999Premonitory ShiverTwo Junes Part SixInterview from an interview with Enid Shomer I know that there are many poets whose work you admire, but who has exerted the most influence on you? Auden, unquestionably. Almost everything I know how to do with the line, I learned from absorbing Auden. You never met him? 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. Marianne Moore? 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 "In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark."
language: English
title: Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence
titlecomplete: Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence
genres: Poetry
ratings_count: 47
awards: awardedAt: 978336000000
name: San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award
publisher: Coffee House Press