Poet Anne M. Doe Overstreet describes thinking about when she became a writer.

I come from a family that read hungrily and constantly; there was music—banjo to clarinet to piano—and hikes beside copper-colored ponds, beneath the huff and shrug of spruce at places like Peaks of Otter, reciting the names of deciduous trees. In between, stillness, time to reflect. And within that, Walter Farley’s novels and Webster’s Dictionary, the 1970 edition, I Capture the Castle and World Book Encyclopedia, which opened up the universe and made me hungry to understand why a Tennessee Walking Horse was what it was. But I cannot tease it apart, say, here I begin, here I turn my face toward a different tree line, moving from reader and listener to writer. It doesn’t begin. It doesn’t end.

I attended a reading of her poetry many months ago. I loved the sound of her words. You can read them for free through Noisetrade now, though leaving a tip would be kind. She’s a poet who rewards her audience with beautiful mystery and perhaps inspiration.

A U.S. Poet Laureate died last weekend. Philip Levine, a Detroit native, was the 18th U.S. Poet Laureate. He was caught in the rain one day when his neighbor noticed him.

Michael Bourne tells the story and a bit more. “The anger that filled him in his early years was of no use to him as a writer, he told me. ‘It was a huge hindrance because it meant I couldn’t write anything worth a damn about that work life,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t get that disinterestedness that’s often required. I couldn’t get Wordsworth’s tranquility. It took me until I was about 35 before I really wrote a poem that was about work.’”

Read some of Levine’s poems here.

“One of the joys of reading late Auden is the pleasure he takes in rare words used correctly,” Patrick Kurp reminds us. “Like his friend Dr. Oliver Sacks, he loved trolling the Oxford English Dictionary for good catches.” Catches like dapatical, for which you’ll have to read his post for context.

Alexander McCall Smith wrote a piece last year about the importance of Auden with a few personal anecdotes. “When I started to write novels set in Edinburgh, the characters in these books – unsurprisingly, perhaps – began to show an interest in Auden. In particular, Isabel Dalhousie, the central character in my Sunday Philosophy Club series, thought about Auden rather a lot – and quoted him, too. A couple of years after the first of these novels was published, I received a letter from his literary executor, Edward Mendelson, who is a professor of English at Columbia University in New York. . . . I then wrote Professor Mendelson into an Isabel Dalhousie novel, creating a scene in which he comes to Edinburgh to deliver a public lecture on the sense of neurotic guilt in Auden’s verse.”