Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence

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."