From Devin Kelly's Newsletter

REGARDING KIM ADDONIZIO'S POEM "SOLACE" 

(regarding: Art / sometimes can enter / through a sliver.)

As in: sometimes we are not calmed or soothed or moved by what is offered to us—the seemingly-trite line shared right in the midst of grief—but instead we are moved by what we are surprised by, if only we allow ourselves just the smallest sliver of opportunity to be surprised. That sliver that Addonizio mentions—it's the old note a friend once left me that I keep tucked into the smallest pocket of my biggest jacket. It's a butterfly on a bench when you think of your late grandmother as a butterfly. It's the cardinal on the balcony's railing. The sun's fire-shimmer on the water. It's a murmuration of birds; it's a toddler in mismatching shoes. It's the sliver in ourselves that we keep open, even when we are more than halfway to being gone. It's not hope, I don't think. But it's not full-blown despair. It's remembering, whether we are resigned to it or not, that we are alive. 

(regarding: Once, / when no one was near, / a split tree / calmed me)

Sometimes, it is what is broken that offers us the permission to feel noticed in our brokenness. What blooms can often feel unattainable, and what breaks can feel more like who we are. That's why fragility, to me, is a more peaceful concept than immortality. The split tree—struck once by lightning, burned and scarred by fire, ravaged by disease—has something to say about wholeness, having once been whole and having now the opportunity to reimagine what wholeness means. You'd stop, wouldn't you, to touch its bark? To watch the light shadow itself through the frayed branches?

REGARDING SHORT PASSAGE FROM THE BOOK HAVING AND BEING HAD BY EULA BISS

The poets I knew made their money like everyone else, as teachers or bartenders, but what they did for poetry, and for each other, was most often given away.

Read entirety of Devin's newsletter here: https://open.substack.com/pub/ordinaryplots/p/kim-addonizios-solace?r=69bwh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false