>The December 24 & 31, 2007 issue of The New Yorker has two poems by Grace Paley, who died in August. Her new collection, Fidelity, will be published in March. Here, first we have “One Day, in which the speaker dwells on future loss.
Then there’s “Suddenly There’s Poughkeepsie” which isn’t online, but is worth finding and reading: “what a hard time/ the Hudson River has had/ trying to get to the sea” – which sounds more like poetry than most Grace Paley poems do. This one, though needs to be read in her voice, which is the voice of a little Jewish grandmother, which is what she was.
Seeing these poems made me think about the workshop I did with her in Mexico three years ago, at about the time I started this blog. If you are fond of Grace’s work, you might want to go here and read forward through the month of January 2005 as I describe my anticipation of and then the thrill of meeting and working with Grace. What an honor and a pleasure that was.
>Thanks for sharing your experiences with Grace – it made me reflect on my own. I studied with her at a writing conference back in, ah, 1985 or 84, when I had just graduated with my BA. I realize now just how generous she was with me.
I think the world of her.