Henri Cole

In the midst of all that has gone so very wrong with my life I've discovered Henri Cole. Right now i'm reading Blackbird and Wolf, which he read from when i went to The Academy of American Poets 2008 awards ceremony a couple of weeks ago in The New School Auditorium. This was the second Awards event i've been to for The Academy & I seem to "discover" some new poet-- or one that i've never been conscious of before anyway. I was young and in the extremely snarky years of my twenties when Ruth Stone read her quiet spacious poems as she got The Wallace Stevens Award. After the awards I was walking home w/ my friend and when i asked him who he liked and he said he really only liked her, the well of antagonism that rose up in me.... I was going through my Sylvia Plath phase where i felt persecuted at every turn -- by whom? Mostly by my own paranoia-- to be striving at something concrete in order to become the "successful woman" or lacking that, to produce that multitudinous manifestation of womanhood: the child-- which would have been an acceptable excuse as to what i was doing with my life. Anyway, anything domestic to me was suspect. My reasoning was that domesticity was the reason why Sylvia Plath was dead. Society of the 50's and early 60's had dictated that being a working woman was optional but motherhood was a necessity. As she read her poetry--which she had preface with a brief synopsis of how she had focused on raising her children first & her writing second-- the tug I felt toward her self-possession and quietude was met w/ just this mutinous upwelling of feelings: I refuse to be drawn in. House and family is not the answer! And my friend-- late teens, chubby and gay-- what the hell does he know! I was incredulous and told him that i liked someone else who had read (who i don't even remember now). I know it wasn't Galway Kinnell, who's the only one else i remember getting an award that night-- and whose poetry i've yet to even come close to understanding. Anyway, long story short, it only took time and the passing years for me to gradually come to understand how valuable the comforts of home are. How the insights of a life lived w/ such a degree of balance is a hard earned commodity. These are lessons that i'm learning the hard way.