For today's Poetry Friday, we celebrate Margaret Atwood, born on this date in 1939
Happy birthday to Margaret Atwood, a two-time NYS Writers Institute visiting writer (1998 and 2005). (Photo credit: Getty Images)
Decades before Margaret Atwood became an international star with her 1985 blockbuster novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985), she was teaching at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and writing poetry. Her first book of poetry, Double Persephone, was published as a pamphlet in 1961.
Atwood's poem "Carrying Food Home In Winter," printed below, was published in the April 1969 edition of Poetry Magazine. That edition featured five of Atwood's poems, four poems by John Ashbery (1927-2017), who would be recognized as New York State Poet from 2001- 2003, and "The Distances" by Jim Carroll (1950-2009), who later wrote the memoir The Basketball Diaries (1978) and visited Albany's legendary QE2 club for readings in the late 1980s.
Atwood first visited the Writers Institute in 1998. Below her poem, you'll find a video excerpt from her second visit in 2005 visit.
A towering figure of contemporary literature, Atwood has written more than 35 books of fiction, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, radio and television scripts, taking on the themes of the human condition, feminist concerns, the dark side of human behavior, and political power.
Carrying Food Home in Winter
By Margaret Atwood
I walk uphill through the snow
hard going
brown paper bag of groceries
balanced low on my stomach,
heavy, my arms stretching
to hold it turn all tendon.
Do we need this paper bag
my love, do we need this bulk
of peels and cores, do we need
these bottles, these roots
and bits of cardboard
to keep us floating
as on a raft
above the snow I sink through?
The skin creates
islands of warmth
in winter, in summer
islands of coolness.
The mouth performs
a similar deception.
I say I will transform
this egg into a muscle
this bottle into an act of love
This onion will become a motion
this grapefruit
will become a thought.
Source: Poetry (April 1969)
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