Tag Archives: Daniel Brown

Short poem: Daniel Brown, ‘So Large’

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Big world when I was very young.
The shopping aisles a mile long …
Our lawn, though anything but wide,
Unfolding like the countryside …
The sky! So large and far away …
Exactly as it is today.

*****

Daniel Brown writes: “In his brilliant tome ‘The Poem’, Don Paterson says  “[I]f you ‘get a good idea for a poem’, I’d suggest you run a mile, as this generally isn’t the way poems make themselves known.” Advice worth attending to, though it’s also worth noting the little ‘out’ Paterson gives himself with that ‘generally’. I’m glad Robert Frost didn’t run from the powerfully suggestive idea–that “the people along the sand” are always looking out to sea, not back at the land–of his ‘Neither Out Far nor In Deep’; that W. S. Merwin didn’t run from the piercing premise–that “every year without knowing it” we pass the date of our death– of his ‘For the Anniversary of my Death’ . . . When the idea for “So Large” hit my hook, I felt like I had a big one on the line.”

“So Large” first appeared in The New Criterion under the title “A Giant.”

Daniel Brown’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, PN Review, Raritan, Parnassus, The New Criterion and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies including Poetry 180 (ed. Billy Collins) and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (ed. David Yezzi). His work has been awarded a Pushcart prize, and his collection Taking the Occasion (Ivan R. Dee, 2008) won the New Criterion Poetry Prize. His latest collection is What More?  (Orchises Press, 2015). Brown’s criticism of poets and poetry has appeared in The Harvard Book Review, The New Criterion, PN Review, The Hopkins Review  and other journals, and the LSU Press has published his critical book, Subjects in Poetry. His Why Bach? and Bach, Beethoven, Bartok are audio-visual ebooks available at Amazon.com. His website is danielbrownpoet.com .

“‘Odd Formations’, England, The Peak District, Kinder Scout Hilltop” by WanderingtheWorld (www.ChrisFord.com) is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Daniel Brown, ‘Isn’t That The Way’

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A river’s winter-silver
Discerned through screening trees
Takes on a certain sorrow
From the barrenness of these;

Of these whose summer glory
Can seem a little sad,
There being not a glimmer
Of river to be had.

*****

Daniel Brown writes: “I used to live in a seventh-story apartment in Manhattan whose kitchen window gave on Riverside Park and the Hudson River beyond. But this prospect had its limitations. I could see the river’s grandeur only in winter, when the intervening trees in the park were bleakly bare.  In the summer the trees were in glorious leaf—thereby blocking my view of the river. I wrote to a friend that this impossibility of having it all, view-wise, was “an emblem of our plight.”  Over the years I’d occasionally think about doing this predicament up as a poem, but my heart would sink at the anticipated tedium of laying out the situation’s physical set-up—the apartment, its location and elevation, its view—so I never attempted the piece. Then, not long ago, I found myself re-interrogating the poem’s possibilities—and recalling the phrase “emblem of our plight.”  It occurred to me that the poem could be cast as, well, emblematic: that laying out the physical set-up needn’t be burdensome because I didn’t have to lay it out; I could leave it out. Suddenly the poem seemed worth a try.”

‘Isn’t That The Way’ was published some years ago in a journal called Parnassus: Poetry in Review.

Daniel Brown’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, PN Review, Raritan, Parnassus, The New Criterion and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies including Poetry 180 (ed. Billy Collins) and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (ed. David Yezzi). His work has been awarded a Pushcart prize, and his collection Taking the Occasion (Ivan R. Dee, 2008) won the New Criterion Poetry Prize. His latest collection is What More?  (Orchises Press, 2015). Brown’s criticism of poets and poetry has appeared in The Harvard Book Review, The New Criterion, PN Review, The Hopkins Review  and other journals, and the LSU Press has published his critical book, Subjects in Poetry. His Why Bach? and Bach, Beethoven, Bartok are audio-visual ebooks available at Amazon.com. His website is danielbrownpoet.com .

Photo: “Riverside Park South, June 2014 – 01” by Ed Yourdon is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.