Passing
The rain was relentless today. I stood in the small, barely covered area that serves as my front porch and watched it fall. The wind slanted it away, and it splashed complex patterns in the puddles it formed on the parking lot. The first line of a poem came to my mind: There must be a woman behind all this rain. The poem was called "The Solid Rainfall, Breaking" and I'm sorry to say I don't remember the poet's name. Internet searches on the title and first line return nothing.
The poem was in an issue of the revived version of William Carlos Williams' little magazine from the 1930s, Contact. It was published from abut 1959 to 1965, and edited for some years by Evan S. Connell. I had several issues in my house. The poem was accompanied by a nice photograph of a rainy scene in a New York City park, and I can't recall who the photographer was either. I hadn't looked at the magazines in years, but I thought of them now and then and intended to dig them up someday to peruse them them again. I don't suppose I'll ever read that poem again now, but I'm sure the first line will come to mind frequently.
Evan S. Connell does show up in Google results, but those results told me that he died in 2013. So recently, and I had missed hearing about it somehow. He was memorialized in the weblog of Harper's Magazine, but I don't follow that, though I am a subscriber to the print edition. If his passing was noted there I didn't see it. Another ending. His magazine was a considerable influence on me during the early 1960s.
Another poem came to my mind this evening, after the rain eased up. It was Yvor Winters' "The Manzanita" and I wish I could post it as my Sunday verse, but I can't find it anywhere on the Internet. This is the shadow of the vast madrone is the final line, which is all I remember at the moment. If I had saved one book from that fire i'd wish it was my volume of Winters. But since I can't find it on the Internet I'll settle for another, though I think I've posted it here before.
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The poem was in an issue of the revived version of William Carlos Williams' little magazine from the 1930s, Contact. It was published from abut 1959 to 1965, and edited for some years by Evan S. Connell. I had several issues in my house. The poem was accompanied by a nice photograph of a rainy scene in a New York City park, and I can't recall who the photographer was either. I hadn't looked at the magazines in years, but I thought of them now and then and intended to dig them up someday to peruse them them again. I don't suppose I'll ever read that poem again now, but I'm sure the first line will come to mind frequently.
Evan S. Connell does show up in Google results, but those results told me that he died in 2013. So recently, and I had missed hearing about it somehow. He was memorialized in the weblog of Harper's Magazine, but I don't follow that, though I am a subscriber to the print edition. If his passing was noted there I didn't see it. Another ending. His magazine was a considerable influence on me during the early 1960s.
Another poem came to my mind this evening, after the rain eased up. It was Yvor Winters' "The Manzanita" and I wish I could post it as my Sunday verse, but I can't find it anywhere on the Internet. This is the shadow of the vast madrone is the final line, which is all I remember at the moment. If I had saved one book from that fire i'd wish it was my volume of Winters. But since I can't find it on the Internet I'll settle for another, though I think I've posted it here before.
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