*a poem by Madeleine Cravens, which I cut out of the New Yorker months ago, because I loved the words, the cadence, the emphasis on – well, you’ll see. It is taken from her debut book of poetry, Pleasure Principle, published June 2024. For More on Cravens, first, enjoy the poem, and see below!
Not the pleasure of lovers but the pleasure of letters,
a pleasure like weather, delayed and prepared for,
not the pleasure of lessons but the pleasure of errors,
of nightmares, of actors in the black box of a theatre,
not the pleasure of present but the pleasure of later,
the pleasure of letters and weather and terror, asleep
by the lake, unable to answer, the pleasure of candles,
their wax on the table, not the pleasure of saviors
but the pleasure of errors, not the pleasure of marriage
but the pleasure of failure, the pleasure of characters
like family members, their failures and errors, their
laughter and weather, the pleasure of water, terrible
rivers, not the pleasure of empire but the pleasure
of after, our failure to keep an accurate record, not
the pleasure of tethers but the pleasure of strangers,
the terrible strangers who will become your lovers,
not the pleasure of novels but the pleasure of anger,
your failure to answer all of my letters, the pleasure
of daughters, the pleasure of daughters writing letters
in April, the failure of orchards, the terror of mothers,
not the pleasure of planners but the pleasure of errors.
*the emphasis on error, failure, imperfection. Madeleine Cravens was a 2022–2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She received her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Max Ritvo Poetry Fellow. She was the first-place winner of Narrative Magazine’s 2021 Poetry Contest and 2020 ’30 Below’ contest (she’s in her 20s, still, I think), and was a finalist for the 2022 James Hearst Poetry Prize. Her poems have been found in The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and The Washington Square Review. She was raised in Brooklyn and lives in Oakland, CA.
*And in case you don’t know who Wallace Stegner is, please allow me to introduce you to him; he is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. His novel Big Rock Candy Mountain, published in 1943, is one of my favorites. He writes of the west, primarily, and was a founder of the conservation movement in the western part of the U.S. Why he isn’t as well known and as well-read as Steinbeck, I do not know, as they share themes and settings. Maybe because Stegner didn’t write a slim novel perfect for high school English! Regardless, if you haven’t read him, do.