More poetry, more poetry. I've taken up the poetry x 12 challenge offered by Dana Guthrie Martin. This month the challenge is to read a collection that was published in the year you were born. I'm still waiting for my copy of A.R. Ammons' Uplands to come in at the library as well as Mona Van Duyn's To See, To Take.

I love the focus this kind of challenge offers, not too narrow, but a useful tool in beginning my navigation through some wide wide water. My further challenge will be to actually understand some of the work. I suspect a superficial yeah or nay may be all I'm capable of at first. What is the poem trying to do? I don't know. What is the poem about? I don't know. Do I like the words and rhythms? Yes, I hope so. Yes.

As an example, here's one by Ammons that I love for its language though I'm highly uncertain what it's about.

The City Limits

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.