Reaching Out To All

“Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.” – Peter Davison

Born in New York on this date in 1928, Davison grew up in Boulder, CO where his father – a noted Scottish poet – taught at the University of Colorado.  A graduate of Harvard with a writer-filled class that included John Ashbery, Robert Bly and Robert Creeley, Davison earned a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge University where he started his own writing career.   After Cambridge he combined writing with editing and eventually joined the staff of Atlantic Monthly, where he served as Poetry Editor for 30 years.  

      Davison (who died in 2004) employed a “natural” voice in his poems, writing poetry of reminiscence and conservation on subjects ranging from youth to aging to women.  For Saturday’s Poem (and for the season, of course), here is Davison’s,

Peaches

A mouthful of language to swallow:
stretches of beach, sweet clinches,
breaches in walls, bleached branches;
britches hauled over haunches;
hunches leeches, wrenched teachers.

What English can do: ransack
the warmth that chuckles beneath
fuzzed surfaces, smooth velvet
richness, splashy juices.
I beseech you, peach,
clench me into the sweetness
of your reaches.

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