Poem of the Week | June 04, 2013
Rose McLarney: "Wet Not With Weeping"
This week we’re delighted to offer up a new poem by Rose McLarney. Rose’s collection of poems, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, was published by Four Way Books in 2012. She has been awarded The Fellowship of Southern Writers’ biennial George Garrett New Writing Award for Poetry, Alligator Juniper’s 2011 National Poetry Prize, and the Joan Beebe Fellowship at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, Orion, Slate, New England Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, and dozens of other journals. Rose earned her MFA from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and has taught writing at the college.
Author’s Note:
I hope that, in my poems, landscape is more than a backdrop or a decorative flourish. The way in which the speaker relates to landscape reveals his or her attitude toward the world or situation at large, and the landscape is entrusted to carry meaning, to varied and telling degrees.
In my first book, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, I wrote about a very specific quarter of the earth—the Appalachian mountains in which I have spent most all of my life—and allowed its well-worn topography, among other traits, to set the tone of the poems. However, as I’ve moved on to write my next collection, and had to move away from home, I’ve begun to question how I remember places and how I perceive new ones. How do we decide what to include in a landscape? Why will I or won’t I mention the junk cars and eroded banks? How do we decide where we will crop every frame through which we see?
“Wet Not With Weeping” is a willful (a good-willed) representation of my new setting on the opposite coast from the one I know—Oregon in winter. The poem no longer speaks from the certainty of belonging, but with its interrupted syntax, inquires and invites response and confirmation. Taking a big picture approach, making analogies not to personal experience but abstract painting, it shows the speaker composing—and coloring—the landscape.
Wet Not With Weeping
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