Upon Reflection

The March / April issue of The Writer's Chronicle has a great interview with Gregory Orr. One of his responses struck me especially forcefully. When asked which poets had shaped him as a writer, which ones he felt a kinship with, Orr said: "I have this theory that we're looking for stuff that's going to save our lives: poems and songs we love so much that they're a key to our own being. When we find those poems or songs, and a lot of them are lyric poems but sometimes they're songs, we never forget the first time we heard that song. When we find those things, we're finding a kind of key to our own being. If we put together the fifteen songs and poems that we love most in the world and look at them, it's like looking in a mirror that shows your face; it's more one that's showing your soul."

That got me thinking about which 15 songs and poems might reflect an image of my soul. I ended up making a list of 10 of each:

Songs                                                                       Poems    

Bohemian Rhapsody—Queen                                Wreck of the Deutschland—Gerard Manley Hopkins

We Are the Champions—Queen                            Adam's Curse—W.B. Yeats       

Here You Come Again—Dolly Parton                   Facts About the Moon—Dorianne Laux

Music Again—Adam Lambert                               The Peace of Wild Things—Wendell Berry

Foot Loose—Kenny Loggins                                 Valediction Forbidding Mourning—John Donne

Sea Cruise—Frankie Ford                                      Fragments—Stephen Dobyns

Me and Bobby McGee—Janis Joplin                     Let Evening Come—Jane Kenyon

Maggie May–Rod Stewart                                      Funeral Blues—W.H. Auden

We Didn't Start the Fire—Billy Joel                   After Making Love We Hear Footsteps–Galway Kinnell

Could This Be Magic—The Dubs                          Elegy for Jane—Theodore Roethke

After compiling this list, I looked into the mirror and saw the reflection of my soul. Oh dear. What does yours look like?

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