(CNN) On Saturday morning, as the outcome of the election grew more likely, but in the last moments before the it was called, the TV anchors had fallen into a dull sports-casterish palaver. Low music played, black-and-white photos flipped on rotation. We heard again about Joe Biden's stutter, his childhood in Scranton, his love for his father. It was nice enough, but I admit: I was on edge.
Read MoreWhy we left California and just kept driving east
(CNN)This is how you live during a fire season during the sixth month of a pandemic: One day at a time. Our bags had been packed for a while now, our canned goods and go-boxes at the ready. We'd already been through a couple of red flag warnings this year, and we expect more. And: Everyone around us is living this way. Everyone is weary, and everyone does their best to have a stiff upper lip.
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Read MoreLine Cook // This is Just to Say: On Cooking the Plums
by Tess Taylor | Contributing Writer
This Line Cook is a special guest column from the poet Tess Taylor. In addition to being the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Rift Zone and Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, Taylor has spent a good deal of her life growing and preparing food both professionally and as an intimate gift for those she loves. This one is for you, dear reader: read and eat deeply from the riches of solace she provides us here.
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Read MoreIn California, the sun never rose on Wednesday
(CNN)Wednesday, it was as if the sun never rose. Dawn was murky, and by 8 a.m., it seemed to get darker. A moldering reddish-bronze haze rose around us but also made no light. Inside the house, we re-lit our lamps against the gloaming. The windows swam black, and outside, all morning, above the trees, the sky glowed grisly red. Where we had left the windows open to the night breezes, our papers, clothes, combs and brushes were coated in a fine layer of ash. The air hung, gritty and oddly cold. It was hard not to feel a deep foreboding.
Read MoreHow my family discovered that chickens have chickenality
(CNN) We did not get the chickens because the pandemic was coming. We did not get them to survive what has often felt like the end of the world and has certainly been the end of the world as we knew it.
Read MoreA Poet of Found Language Who Finds Her Language in Archives
CONCORDANCE
By Susan Howe
“One must cross the threshold heart of words,” Susan Howe writes early in her new book, “Concordance,” an appealingly jagged sequence of collage poems. The “threshold heart,” for Howe, is a kind of echo chamber where sound dazzles the inner ear and resonance dances with meaning. To invite us into this complex space, Howe populates the pages of her new book with sliced texts and textures, pasting down items as varied as draft letters, the preface to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Common Law” and (yes) concordances. These collages invite readers into protracted encounters with scraps. Some of the book’s pages are just glued together slivers of dislodged indexes. This is not to say they are not also delightful.
Read MoreTHE INTIMACY OF BREATH
Here is the strange thing: I was already writing poems about the precariousness of California. I’d been writing them for ten years, since I moved back from New York and came back to the East Bay after two decades away. That was 2011. I had just had a baby. At first, it seemed like I was only trying to make sense of the difference between the California I’d grown up in and the California I came back to, but as I wrote, it seemed like I was also trying to make sense of the world, how it had abruptly shifted under our feet, how radically strange it was to be in a place that was at once so prosperous (some of us have clearly won the revolution for expensive cheese) and yet so broken (so many of us have clearly lost the revolution for equity, affordable housing, decent health care, excellent public schools). When I was away in New York, circling the rungs of publishing (it felt like an endless castle with many locked doors), I had written poems to California, and they amounted to wanting sunshine and a lemon tree. They amounted to missing the tang of sage and eucalyptus on a good day; the mercury glaze of sun in February. Coming back to the suburb I’d left two decades before was a sudden heaven: We could afford a broken bungalow, a yard with two huge redwood trees. We cleared out the weeds and planted that lemon tree. The baby grew.
Read MoreWe cling to American rugged individualism at our peril
Opinion by Tess Taylor
Updated 11:47 AM ET, Tue March 17, 2020
(CNN)2019 and 2020 had already been difficult years, crisis and adrenaline wise, in our household. During the summer, when I was a visiting poet at a residency out of state, an angry, confused woman wandered into my class and said: "I have three guns and I want to use 'em." We all froze. It wasn't totally clear if she had the guns, and in this world, at this moment, it didn't have to be. We each know that, when we teach in America, we are already in danger.
Read MoreFollowing Dorothea Lange’s Notebooks
An opinion piece in the NYTimes today about the amazing journey of following the path of Dorothea Lange through California, and the questions she leaves to us now.
by Tess Taylor
Read MoreMarie Ponsot, Poet of Love, Divorce and Family, Dies at 98
After a promising start as a published poet in the 1950s, Marie Ponsot put her career aside. She was a single mother in New York City, with seven children to raise. But she did not stop writing. She filled notebooks with her poems — and then stashed much of her work in a drawer, showing it strictly to friends.
It would be almost a quarter-century before her poetry began to re-emerge, and when it did, she found wide acclaim.
By the end of her long life — she died on Friday at 98 — Ms. Ponsot had translated dozens of books, published seven volumes of poetry, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, taught at Queens College and served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2010 to 2014. She died at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital in Manhattan, her daughter, Monique Ponsot, said.
Ms. Ponsot was first published in the 1950s by Lawrence Ferlinghetti — the Yonkers-born poet who championed the Beat poets from his celebrated San Francisco bookstore, City Lights — in the same series as Allen Ginsberg.
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