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I'm absolutely certain that Olena Kalytiak Davis would not have loved the idea of me sometimes looking for the ephemera of her when I visited Alaska this past summer.

But I did. I searched. Couldn't help it.

I'd met her at Bread Loaf. She'd haunted us all. Reading in the moted light about a wedding dress. Sitting on a stoop in the early morning, the smoke of a cigarette swirling. The things people say and the things she said, and the delicate and fierce in her, and later, riding a train from DC with a fellow National Endowment for the Arts juror, the talk between him and me was almost all Olena. Where she was. What she was doing. How much better mystery is, than fame.

She lives in Alaska. She's a single mom and an attorney. She has a new book out, a third, "The Poem She Didn't Write and Other Poems." And also: Dan Chiasson just gave her two amazing pages in this week's issue of The New Yorker.

I gasped when I saw it. Hadn't find her in Alaska. Found her here, in the dark, after a many-hour work day, when I needed a little actual poetry.

From the last paragraph in this exquisite bit of appreciation, lessons on poetry, thoughts on Davis:

The medium of poetry isn't language, really; it's human loneliness, a loneliness that poets, having received it themselves from earlier poets, transfer to their readers. Like bees in a honeycomb, writers and readers experience isolation and solitude communally and collaboratively.... Writing a poem, you create that vivid otherness; reading one, you re-create it in your own person. These two lonely souls, writer and reader, are bound to one another. They can be miles or centuries apart, but in Davis's book the passage between them sees some heavy traffic.

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In the November 3, 2009 New Yorker, Dan Chaisson, whose articles, essays, and poems I'll stop and read anytime, anywhere, reviews Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, a 900-plus page tome edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.

Reading the review earlier today I felt bereft, somehow, lonely, off course—really, I can't explain it, save to quote for you this paragraph, which foists upon me questions about my own writerly ambitions and constraints and operates as a smack across the mind. Because I write life, whether in memoir, fiction, or poem. I write life. I seek to make life promising.

"Poets live on two tracks: on one, life chugs along in the usual ways. On the other, art, which starts late but soon catches up, has its own landmarks and significant episodes. Interiority isn't mapped by biographical fact; that happens on the other track. And so 'life' is an exceedingly difficult and unpromising subject for art. Bishop aimed for a dispassionate, even eerie objectivity, an effect that was incompatible with autobiographical writing. Lowel, the gifted parodist of persons and manners, found it comparatively easy to turn to his own person and manners, but in doing so he risked giving up the dazzling special effects of his early, Miltonic poems."

Read the whole thing here, for yourself.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/11/03/081103crbo_books_chiasson

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