Ann Tweedy: “I studied with Kim Addonizio at the Ashland Writers’ Conference in Ashland, Oregon, in the summer of 2001. Kim taught me to trust my own voice and to embrace the gritty, unwieldy parts of my life in my writing. She was a generous critic, and I was amazed at the quality of the work that I and other workshop participants produced as a result of the exercises she assigned. In addition to assigning in-class writing, she had us workshop some poems we brought from home. At the beginning of the class, my laptop stopped working, and I panicked at the prospect of not being able to share with her the poems I had brought. Thankfully, I got it back up and running and was able to benefit from her invaluable critiques. I included a couple of the poems we workshopped that summer in my first full-length book. I had discovered Kim’s work at a women’s bookstore in Portland a year or two before that summer workshop and was immediately drawn to the exuberant sadness that characterized much of her early work. I am so glad I had the chance to work with her early in my writing career!” (web)
did you know, if you have a yard
in the right climate, it’s probably patrolled
by one male hummingbird? like the god
who knows every hair on your head,
this bird has memorized each flower
in your yard, including the precise times
at which their nectar cups fill up.
in this way, he can manage
his realm (and his sugar fixes)
efficiently. when he’s not busy drinking,
he catches insects and defends your yard
against intruder hummingbirds.
so, if, like most americans, you harbor
many secret fears, one of which is being
overrun, you can delete that one.
female hummingbirds, by contrast,
tend to lay low so as not to rile
their touchy counterparts. their reasons
to survive are bigger than whatever charge
they’d get from gorging on nectar cups.
many different conclusions can be drawn.
for one, it seems clear that the image
of the hummer with its long beak buried
in a trumpet-like flower is indeed phallic.
another is that, for the benefit of survival,
it is sometimes necessary to weigh
the costs of pleasure carefully. finally,
you might apprehend that you do not really own your property: some hummingbird probably
has an equally valid claim and knows it more intimately.