Both of Ursula K. Le Guin’s parents were anthropologists. Living and working in the hills outside Berkley, California, they studied vanishing native cultures. Her mother, Theodora Kroeber, wrote Ishi in Two Worlds, an account of the last known survivor of the Yahi people.
An accomplished poet, Ursula K. Le Guin is also the author of more than 25 novels and short story collections. Her work is classified as science fiction or fantasy. If you’re not usually a fan of genre fiction, don’t let that classification scare you! Le Guin may be writing about space travel and aliens, but she is really doing anthropology. In Always Coming Home, she creates a whole culture including, songs, maps, and poems for an imagined people called the Kesh. She asks questions about intentional communities and the longing for utopia in The Dispossessed, and she muses about the nature and uses of education in the Earthsea series.
Her poetry is more firmly rooted in this world. In her last book of poems, Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014, published at the age of 87, Le Guin was working at the height of her powers. The poems are stripped down to essentials, but nothing is missing. This fine collection also includes an essay called “Form, Free Verse, Free Form: Some Thoughts” which is a master class on the relationship between formal poems and free verse.
Writing Together
How does setting influence your poetic work? Try writing a poem where setting is everything. Whether it’s Le Guin’s California foothills, the banks of a creek bravely winding its way to the ocean, or an utterly new planet that only you have explored!
Photo by David, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Kortney Garrison.
__________
Check out our patron-only writing & publishing opportunities!
- Poetry Prompt: Fireworks, Sparkles & Speckles - July 2, 2018
- Writing Prompt: Science Fiction and Ecopoetry - June 25, 2018
- Poetry Prompt: Science Fiction with Ray Bradbury - June 18, 2018
Shannon Mayhew says
This is as much a “Where I’m From” poem, with a deep bow to George Ella Lyon, as much as it is a setting poem. The setting is this planet, although sometimes I do feel like I’m from another one! 😉
Bio
1970’s
I’m from August alley wiffle ball games
I am up to bat,
graveldust sticking to scraped shins
Thick breezes carry garlic and soy
I’m from tiny houses, big cars
Roller skate to Pency’s to buy Dots
and cap-gun ammunition
I’m from race you home after school –
Wednesdays we run hurdles
Five garbage bags in one leap
Steer clear of the tough kids, so desperate for their own power
Fourth Street kids play board games on a splintered picnic table
Maria sits underneath and peeks at Clue cards
We laugh, and eat Doritos and egg rolls (made with urgency and gratitude)
1980’s
I’m from dusk cornfield hide-and-seek
Crunching footsteps, rustling stalks
reveal your position
Winds carry pine, cut grass, pungent fertilized fields
I’m from rooftop stargazing, boisterous crickets
Ripples, stone-skips, echoing toad-croaks
Three-legged skunk snacking on patio catfood
Climbing trees
Stinging bees
Mudpies, inchworms, cattails
Cats, miracle kittens, life emerging from life,
and settling to stillness in garden graves
with geode headstones
I’m from orange tabby sunsets
Ropeswings, tied to trees, creaking and swishing
As I swing into a creamsicle sky
Donna Falcone says
Shannon, these “I am…” poems work so well as setting poems! Wish I’d thought of that and so glad YOU did. Thank you for sharing your work here. It’ll be fun to see what others come up with. 🙂
Geode headstones. How interesting.
Shannon Mayhew says
Thank you, Donna! Yes, my childhood home did have a garden which we consecrated with purple pansies and sparkly headstones for our cats that had passed. And down the hill from the garden was the pond where all the stone-skipping and toad-croaking happened! 🙂 Quite a difference from the action of the city life we’d left.
Rick Maxson says
I echo Donna’s comment on your “I am” poems Shannon. Bio indeed.
Kortney Garrison says
Yes, setting and season is redolent in this piece, Shannon. Thank you for sharing…I’d love to read the 90’s stanza and beyond!
Shannon Mayhew says
Thanks, Kortney! Hmm… perhaps I should continue through the decades! If/when I do, I will share it!
Kortney Garrison says
Rich week for Ursula K Le Guin fans!
Literary Arts will be live streaming a tribute to Ursula this Wednesday at 7:30 pm Pacific: http://www.literary-arts-tribute.org/
And you can help publish her last poetry collection with this Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/896286441/ursula-k-le-guin-a-poets-legacy?ref=ekxqhq
Rick Maxson says
At Big Sur
—for Carol
Photograph of you, light blazer,
turtleneck, blue jeans, light hair,
and off your left shoulder,
where your hair falls on a lapel,
is the Pacific Ocean and a gray sky.
It is not a melancholy sky. The ocean
too is gray, with a hint of aquamarine
swimming to the surface.
They are like two mirrors reflecting
one another, each holding both an image
and the reality of the image as its own.
Here is the mystery of this day:
Where is the small rock in the mirror
of the sky, the blemish with the spume of wave,
near the edge of what we see?
I say mirrors. And if you told me,
the sky I see is not the sky,
I would say, enough of that! Look,
those enduring tufts of grass stand tall,
even though the vast Pacific seems to lay
its miles of rolling in a gathering of cotton swirl along their petioles.
And the grass, with its panne embossing
on the raw cocoa silk of rock at the woman’s feet,
see how it gathers effortlessly beneath
the flame-stitch organza trim of alfilaria;
and the broach of quartz, so elegant
the way it nearly escapes the observer entirely.
My gaze falls then on your left boot,
fashionably cinnabar in this light,
in a perfect downward slope,
and expanding beyond all of this:
the faux-verdigris of the Pacific,
the fire and velvet of the earth’s
early evening camisole,
and the uncalculated batting of your lashes
over the ocean’s eye
as it gazes surreptitiously on you balanced
like sunlight on the pied boulders.
You will say this too is not the truth,
how your face is not the sun you wear
around your neck, your hair the wave-form
of the wind and not the wind itself, perfect in its disregard,
circling your right eye
that sees me for the instant of a shutter.
Almost unnoticed is the road behind you,
only a dash of road in the background
of your right shoulder, and the promise
of a road, so subtle in the cliffs beyond.
It is the road that led me here to this timeless day,
watching your smile, the beautiful
disorder in the cuff of your jeans, frayed like tuft grass.
Enough of this, you say!
But I will see the heart of you, a lioness in a waking stretch,
here or in some tropic isle,
where you dance in tiered chiffon, or in white cotton
with a deck of cards, barefoot on a Sunday much like this.
The promise turns its mysterious way
along these ancient cliffs,
but what I see and I will remember always
is the pre-eminence of you in the midst of splendor.
Rick Maxson says
In and around the lake
bound with a sheer cliff,
the water licks the chiseled stone
and lifts into the air,
a sound like lips kissing.
The walls ascend, like a barge bow
in the breathing of a deep sea,
or a rough cup steeping morning tea.
There is here a shifting
of the mind’s tide,
from the push and tow
that forms the sculpted world
to the waves of light in the rounded sky.
The day floats like a seed blown in the wind.
The sun choreographs its lambent dancers,
to the sound of seeking, tree to tree.
I am like a leaf fallen from aspen,
held in the arms of this palpable day.
You may not notice me out on the water,
vanishing into my own perceptions,
you on the edge, feet dangling into space,
the light between us busy forming Summer.
Shannon Mayhew says
Rick, I love everything about this. Thank you for sharing and for transporting me to such a magical place and day. I especially enjoyed the “rough cup steeping morning tea” you offered!