Marking the New Year with a poet

 You can’t mark a New Year without thinking about the passage of time. I like to hear what the poets have to say.

That’s what I said last year.  I was reading Charles Reznikoff then. This year, I’m reading Stephen Dunn, one of my favorite contemporaries. He died in 2021.

His poem “The Hours” is a meditation on how our time passes, how our lives pass. He considers the different ways we spend time, and the way he had spent time.

            The worst was to live by someone else’s time,

            The hours scheduled for him, smudged

            With clarity and motives not his own.

The evening hours are dependent on “Desire & Need.” But there are lovely hours, “prolonged fiestas of the mind.”

• Source: Stephen Dunn, Different Hours; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Last year’s note on Charles Reznikoff’s “Heart of the Clock” is here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/01/happy-new-year.html