Jane Kenyon Under My Bed

By which I don’t mean to start talking about how hard it is for me to talk about poetry; how when I tell you what books I’ve read this month I’m not going to name poetry books because books are not a unit of poetry. And I’m not going to tell you how when I was in college, broke, money just enough for rent, gas, cigarettes, I determined the only books to buy, keep, savor, invest in were poetry and philosophy being not reliant–you must hear youthful scorn here– on mère plot. I don’t know a lot of things now I knew for sure at nineteen and twenty. But this morning reaching for a shoe I instead grabbed Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems that had been set down just under the edge of my bed when it had accompanied me towards...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Oct 4, 2011 | 1 comment

Stories for Self-help

The advantage to staying in bed until there is just enough sunlight in the room to make the silhouettes sharp presences rather than looming suggestions is that at the edge of the mattress the blue-green sheets are illuminated in this long narrow band of near whiteness which makes you think of those images of the sun rising over the earth from space. Of course it also allows you to tell yourself that you are nursing the cold that has crowded your head, made breathing work, filled the spaces that you are used to taking for granted as space in your head, altered the acoustics of everything that is disconcerting when you are so regularly focused on attention to what you hear. Staying in bed allows you to pretend everything hasn’t been just hard this week, the...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Oct 1, 2011 | 1 comment