Poetry in a Glass – Thirsty Camel Cocktails

Prose in a Glass: Unanticipated and Joyful

December 12, 2018 Carla Camerieri Comments 0 Comment

A few weeks ago I wrote about a poem by Mary Oliver called “Praying” that I immediately fell in love with because of its simplicity, and because it focused on cultivating mindfulness and creating stillness. I wanted to know more, and so I read lots of her poetry and learned as much as I could about her life. I discovered a book that she’d written called Our World, a tribute to her partner of 40 years, Molly Malone Cook, and their life together in Provincetown. The book …

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Parable in a Glass: Elevation

November 27, 2018 Carla Camerieri Comments 0 Comment

I find that I often struggle with the idea of non-attachment and how to find a way to practice it in my everyday life. I bought a pair of Frye boots recently that are nothing short of amazing. They are a beautiful oxblood color with a really cool zipper on the side, and they fit me perfectly. And what makes them even more wonderful is that I got them for a fantastic price! This feels like true love, and I’m certain of our future together. Does that mean that I’m attached to them? More …

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Poetry in a Glass: The Doorway Into Thanks

November 19, 2018 Carla Camerieri Comments 0 Comment

I’ve written about the ideas of mindfulness and gratitude a number of times on this blog, but since we’re a few days away from a national holiday that celebrates being thankful, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to to look at a poem from Mary Oliver that examines both. Oliver is an American poet born in 1935 who has won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. She writes in the Romantic style and her poems focus on the natural world as an evocation of what we feel as …

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Poetry in a Glass: A Carefully Loaded Ship

November 12, 2018 Carla Camerieri Comments 0 Comment

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince, a sweetly sentimental novella deemed by The New Yorker Magazine to be “a seminal text for the sixties generation of dropouts and flower children.” That’s not exactly high praise for an author’s best known work, but I know that if I confess that I thoroughly enjoyed The Little Prince and that I cried at the end of it, I would not be alone in that admission. Although Saint-Exupéry was in Paris at the same time as Hemingway, …

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Poetry in a Glass: Toothed Moon Rising

October 29, 2018 Carla Camerieri Comments 0 Comment

Since it’s Halloween week, I became fairly obsessed with the idea of finding a poem for you today that would meet certain requirements. It had to be fairly high up on the creepiness scale, it had to convey the way in which the suddenly vacant landscape of autumn can be just a little bit unsettling, and it had to contain a ghost or haunting of some sort. That was a tall order, and I searched and searched before I found “All Hallows,” written by Louise Gluck, a Pulitzer prize-winning contemporary poet born in 1943 whose careful use of imagery and sparse language truly captures the feeling of both the holiday and the season. I’d never read it before, but it has lingered with me over the last few days, and I knew it would be perfect for today’s post. I was so fascinated by this poem, in fact, that I quickly ordered a collection of Gluck’s poetry so that I could read more. …

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