Porter, Anne

United States, (1911-2011)

Living Things

  1. Our poems
  2. Are like the wart-hogs
  3. In the zoo
  4. It’s hard to say
  5. Why there should be such creatures
  6.  
  7. But once our life gets into them
  8. As sometimes happens
  9. Our poems
  10. Turn into living things
  11. And there’s no arguing
  12. With living things
  13. They are
  14. The way they are
  15.  
  16. Our poems
  17. May be rough
  18. Or delicate
  19. Little
  20. Or great
  21.  
  22. But always
  23. They have inside them
  24. A confluence of cries
  25. And secret languages
  26.  
  27. And always
  28. They are improvident
  29. And free
  30. They keep
  31. A kind of Sabbath
  32.  
  33. They play
  34. On sooty fire escapes
  35. And window ledges
  36.  
  37. They wander in and out
  38. Of jails and gardens
  39. They sparkle
  40. In the deep mines
  41. They sing
  42. In breaking waves
  43. And rock like wooden cradles.

© Anne Porter. Living Things: Collected Poems. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press (2006).

About the Poet:

Anne Porter, United States, (1911-2011), was a poet who was educated at Bryn Mawr College and Radcliffe College. Porter wrote poetry since she was a child. Married to the painter Fairfield Porter, she raised five children in a busy, artistic household, frequently forced to pursue writing on the side. When her husband died in 1975, she began to write poetry much more seriously.

Her first collection, An Altogether Different Language (1994), published when she was 83, was named a finalist for the National Book Award. Her other volumes of poetry include Living Things: Collected Poems (2006) and The Birds of Passage (1989).

Of her own late arrival on the poetry scene, Porter noted: “People don’t use their creativity as they get older. They think this is supposed to be the end of this and the end of that. But you can’t always be so sure that it is the end.” [DES-02/22]

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