I already knew I loved Grace Paley’s short stories, and it turns out that I love her poems, too. I love her city-poems, about streets I recognize, like “An Arboreal Mystery” (which begins with the lines “On Jane Street in October\/I saw three gingko trees”) and “20th Street Spring” (about the seminary way out on the western edges of Chelsea). Her country-poems, about Vermont hills and leaves and sky and the perils and pleasures of home-ownership, are wonderful, too: simple and beautiful and funny, not precious, not trite. Paley writes about being a woman, about being in love, about being an American liberal activist, about being the child of immigrant parents, about growing old (“at last a woman\/in the old style sitting\/stout thighs apart under\/a big skirt”), and through it all, even in the poems about political outrages, about people dying in America and abroad, there’s a sense of life, or more: a love of life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I already knew I loved Grace Paley’s short stories, and it turns out that I love her poems, too. I love her city-poems, about streets I recognize, like “An Arboreal Mystery” (which begins with the lines “On Jane Street in October\/I saw three gingko trees”) and “20th Street Spring” (about the seminary way out on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}