This is Michael Carey for Voices From the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s poem is Sonnet for Minimalists by Mona Van Duyn a Waterloo native, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States. Unlike most of her poems, this one has just a few short lines. There is almost nothing there. But in them as you’ll hear she writes in form, movingly, truthfully yet not without humor about old age and sudden joys that one should never despair of. It’s amazing how much she accomplishes in so little.
From a new peony,
my last anthem,
a squirrel in glee
broke the budded stem.
I thought, where is joy
without fresh bloom,
that old heart’s ploy
to mask the tomb?
Then a volunteer
stalk from sour
bird-drop this year
burst in frantic flower.
The world’s perverse,
but it could be worse.
"Sonnet for Minimalists" by Mona Van Duyn from Near Changes published by Alfred A. Knopf originally published in Poetry.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.
Biography
Mona Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1921. She is the author of nine books of poems: Firefall (1994); If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959-1982 (1994); Near Changes (1990), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize; Letters From a Father, and Other Poems (1982); Merciful Disguises (1973, reissued 1982); Bedtime Stories (1972); To See, To Take (1970), which received the National Book Award; A Time of Bees (1964); and Valentines to the Wide World (1959). With her husband, Jarvis Thurston, she founded Perspective, a Quarterly of Literature in 1947, and co-edited it until 1970. She has been awarded the Bollingen Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Loines Prize of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize and the Eunice Tietjens Award from Poetry, and the Shelley Memorial Prize, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.