Jennifer Richter
I Find Myself Shelved between Rich and Rilke
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels?
(the skies are full of them
going and coming and often staying all night,
levitating
under an open window:
a galactic cloud)
Ah, whom can we ever turn to?
(heart sweating through my body)
Who, if I cried out, would hear me
(a woman trying to
listen to the voice of the wind:
untranslatable language)
Not angels, not humans―
(accurately transmitted
voices, voices
whispering at last)
perhaps the birds.
Rilke’s lines (tr. Stephen Mitchell) are from the first of his Duino Elegies.
Rich’s lines are from her poem “Planetarium.”
Jennifer Richter's second poetry collection, No Acute Distress, was chosen as the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection and will be published in March 2016. Natasha Trethewey chose her first book, Threshold, as winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition; Robert Pinsky chose it as a 2011 Oregon Book Award Finalist. Her work has been featured recently in Prairie Schooner and has appeared in many national publications including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, and A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry. She was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship in Poetry by Stanford University, where she taught in the Creative Writing Program for four years; she currently lives in Corvallis, Oregon, and teaches in Oregon State University’s MFA Program. Visit her website here: http://jenniferrichterpoet.com/
Return to September 2015 Edition
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels?
(the skies are full of them
going and coming and often staying all night,
levitating
under an open window:
a galactic cloud)
Ah, whom can we ever turn to?
(heart sweating through my body)
Who, if I cried out, would hear me
(a woman trying to
listen to the voice of the wind:
untranslatable language)
Not angels, not humans―
(accurately transmitted
voices, voices
whispering at last)
perhaps the birds.
Rilke’s lines (tr. Stephen Mitchell) are from the first of his Duino Elegies.
Rich’s lines are from her poem “Planetarium.”
Jennifer Richter's second poetry collection, No Acute Distress, was chosen as the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection and will be published in March 2016. Natasha Trethewey chose her first book, Threshold, as winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition; Robert Pinsky chose it as a 2011 Oregon Book Award Finalist. Her work has been featured recently in Prairie Schooner and has appeared in many national publications including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, and A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry. She was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship in Poetry by Stanford University, where she taught in the Creative Writing Program for four years; she currently lives in Corvallis, Oregon, and teaches in Oregon State University’s MFA Program. Visit her website here: http://jenniferrichterpoet.com/
Return to September 2015 Edition