Meet the “More Immediate and Intense” Ursula K. Le Guin

Caveat Lector: (1) This review essay assumes a reader who has little knowledge of Le Guin’s expansive canon of poetry. I was one of those readers; (2) I make no pretense of knowing the scholarship on the poems. Because my source of information, Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems, is excellent, I do, however, hope some of my comments will be useful to the poetry-knowledgeable readers; (3) I am not an “objective” Le Guin reader. My admiration for her writing and decades of correspondence with her make me a sympathetic reader. Readers of Utopian Studies who know Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985) know that she writes poetry. Emersion into the Kesh culture includes reading the four “POEMS” sections and reading and possibly listening to the Kesh songs on a tape, CD, or online. With the notable exception of readers acquainted with Le Guin’s poetry, many readers, including me, would assume that these poems were interesting enhancements to Le Guin’s ambitious attempt to create an encyclopedic, multivoiced portrait of an imaginary culture that included music, dance, song, and poetry. The poems were a sideline created for a specific book. The Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems (2023) reveals how totally inaccurate this assumption is. We discover that Le Guin’s first publication, in 1959, was the poem “Folk Song from the Montayna Province” (745, 758), and she delivered her final publication, So Far, So Good: Final Poems: 2024–2018 (2018), to her publisher one week before her passing (back jacket). Collected Poems offers 706 pages of her poetry: thirteen collections (1975–2018) and sixty-five published but uncollected poems (1959–2018). In many cases there are two or more poems on a single page. The result: more than a thousand poems. That’s certainly not just a sideline. The forms of these poems range from complex philosophical poems (“Finding My Elegy,” 519–20) to short, lighthearted glimpses and familiar forms (“The Cat”: “He walks upon his paws / To the places that he goes, / Followed by his tail / And proceeded by his nose,” 706). There is even a short satiric “A Scene from an Opera” that mocks stock brokers, politicians, poets, and physicists (653–54). Familiar meter and rhyme schemes organize many poems, but the Kesh inspired “Stammersong” is as free and simple as a skinny vertical line, mostly one word per line (507). Many references to Greco-Roman mythology enrich the historic and mythic depth of poems; there are also references to Nordic, Native American, European, South American, and Asian myth and philosophy. Collected Poems includes all eighty-one “chapters” of Le Guin’s translation of Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching (221–89), plus Le Guin’s extensive notes on sources and individual chapters (290–311).Even readers thoroughly familiar with Le Guin’s poetry will be immensely pleased to have “all” the poetry available in one place accompanied by an introduction’s praise by an internationally famous scholar and 115 pages of detailed supporting essays, bibliographies, and notes. This is all wonderful, unless you happen to be the reviewer of the collection. It would take several books to do justice to this collection. My response to this daunting task is a three-part review essay that proceeds from brief descriptions of the sections of the book, to discussions of connections between the poems and Le Guin’s fiction, and finally to readings of important poems that reveal personal qualities and convictions: her humor and feistiness, her deep empathy for, even identity with, nature, and her decades-long exploration of the relations between time gone and time present in elegies and profiles of aging. I frequently quote lines and stanzas. I want readers unfamiliar with Le Guin’s poetry to encounter her in her own words. Those excerpts are preceded or followed by brief interpretations. The result: a survey-sampler that skims the surface of a thousand poems. I chose this approach because I hoped to offer an overview of the astonishing variety and scope of Le Guin’s poetry and because I believe that, for readers unfamiliar with her poetry or even those who know some of the poetry, this collection will reinforce, expand, and even change perceptions of Le Guin the writer and the person.The editors divide Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems into seven parts: “Introduction” (xxv–lii); the poems (1–706); “Selected Prose [by Le Guin] About Poetry” (707–38); “Chronology” (739–55); “Note on the Texts” (756–62); “Notes” (763–803); and “Index of Titles and First Lines” (804–24).1 It is appropriate that one of America’s major writers is introduced by one of America’s best-known literary scholars, Harold Bloom. The appropriateness extends to personal connections. Le Guin and Bloom were email correspondents. His commitment to her as a writer and as a person is unquestionable. Bloom signed the introduction “August 2019.” He died in October 2019. This may have been his last writing.I speculate that the pressures of his personal commitment, his failing health, and his encyclopedic knowledge impelled him to write a tribute charged by provocative claims and abrupt transitions. For example, six pages into the introduction, Bloom claims that Le Guin’s “deepest concern, sometimes concealed, is marriage” (xlii). He immediately switches to a discussion of Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), where “androgyny makes marriage irrelevant” (xlii). Then, after a long quote from that novel, he switches to a sustained discussion of the concept “duende”—an inspiration or passion incarnate as an impish supernatural figure that Le Guin associated with the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (1898–1936). Bloom quotes her poem “Lorca’s Duenda” to suggest how she defined the invasive passion. This is the opening into my the in an a is certainly a and Bloom Le Guin as a poet who that not a a of be that from the of the to the This is preceded by a long quote from Lorca and not by to Le Guin’s poetry, but by a on of with and to in and He switches to a of in poetry by and with poem assume that these of to Le Guin’s are to make specific connections. seven pages after the Bloom to his by Le Guin’s “A on an tribute to the long between the she was and the he was I that Bloom or possibly his the and impelled him to with a of I be I do know that the my of the and of a of inspiration I little an inspiration that Le Guin and to her of Le Guin’s on that Bloom Le Guin many of her poems by in this the and the He also offers familiar but important claims Le Guin’s and He that the in the poetry not from or but from an with that Bloom is to be a Bloom not Le Guin’s that of poetry with is more and than that of he her own between her poems that and an or her poems that that have of the of the He also offers a discussion of one of Le Guin’s complex poems, My a poem and I in the of this sections that introduction and Le Guin’s poems are and The of Le Guin’s poetry includes her of and poems, and the that many of her poems Le Guin as a major the of writing in her and that she to she on those to her and the these is including and for and as and even the two important Le Guin makes her poetry, one is to be the may of the of poetry for Le to her commitment to the is her that of poetry with is more and than that of more and more be Le Guin’s two comments the between poetry and poetry is more than and in response to an the of and in her poetry, is a and some that I with, were a of poetry of into poetry. My to “Chronology” of Collected Poems October and Le Guin’s she and So Far, So Good: Final Poems: 2024–2018 was In between these an of and comments a of and for fiction, fiction, short and in the to by the in The “Chronology” is more than a that her and the of her extensive interesting the between Le Guin’s and poetry. her in her and with her and and on and poetry, the on the poetry of Le Guin’s first in was a her first collection of poetry, after many readers four of her of Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The of from and The her passion for poetry, the for the first and all that writing little time for a collection. you want to have a literary in you have to poetry. Le Guin certainly her in It was to some time on her first I and on a lines in that first collection. In the of to the first last a from the the my but not my and the the with an for the and not of and fiction, Le Guin she of to in a that was more and than that of more and more the the and the passion. was to her “Note on the Texts” that Collected Poems includes offers a of the thirteen collections and the sixty-five published but uncollected poems. I would have that the of the collections also on the pages of collection in the of the book. I the makes for There are of poems in this as as in the “Chronology” and the “Notes” sections of the one poem The Library of has published an of Always Coming no to this collection with of the poems from The The that collection was with the poet she and Le Guin poems So these poems poems by Le is the of of poems by the these poems by Le but to some This is certainly the and a for the to Le Guin’s with extensive of Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching between the of the poetry and of Tao Te Ching is that Le Guin not know she was with a translation into by her knowledge of and her extensive knowledge of that to the translation of Tao Te Ching was from the and with Le Guin’s on in a more than her of poems. her Tao Te Ching her in than a translation I the of in the “Notes” were a of the references to American, European, South American, Native American, and Asian and to the many places and in the poems; and to as as personal including Le Guin’s for Guin her and writing as a from her poetry writing Readers to of the or of after to will be There however, many connections between the and a collection of poems. The and the to Le Guin’s and and there is an specific to a For in the poem to the who Le Guin as she Always Coming a of is to of is an important place in Always Coming and in the Kesh little a Le Guin in correspondence In the collection of lighthearted poems of in a between Le Guin’s and music, an of imaginary where be for listening For example, on is an are also several in the Collected Poems that, in my a who a him / where the in just a after the of The It may have been or just after she that The poem with a to Le Guin and her / as the were not The poem with how would the that me all on all an of the and There are in the Collected Poems that was more than who inspired the of and more than Le Guin was inspired by the there are no sustained descriptions of Le Guin’s of and there are glimpses of For she offers glimpses of the and the For she an to the of a to in a In a from present the in is will The for the to be by a It will to the first It will the of of of of of the the the the first of to Le Guin the by the of those The is a of the of the and where were and Guin of her glimpses of in the and of these and the of the The opening of of the all these in her portrait of with and a of word I make a This and and of is the The in the Guin’s translation of Lao Tao Te Ching a concept of as but is a that is and in these the not to one may no of know to know there be a many have that do the of or a her extensive notes on her translation of Le Guin that this as or is to an interesting have but by In and by to Guin’s interesting poems and in a single of these poems in her Tao Te Ching translation the in the of My published in Le Guin was (“The of the The a is with an more and in the more the more of a a and the after to be and the do and the on have and the are the in of the is by and and her you you the the the to a on those who to / be not but the of The the by with an may to the in the into the the of Guin’s poetry the and of and the her or her essay “A of as a to and into she and range from to of the and the important as Le Guin’s glimpses of and are to of her fiction, is her on in her poetry that is even more is her poems is the variety of forms of that she from the lighthearted and to the and This variety her the to in and from many the for between forms that readers of Le Guin’s and In and she and to the and of familiar and the opening of be been my an a the a who to the the are in Le Guin’s The poem with the the of the and the of the the of the of a me to I my as as I the has his of but her and he me The rhyme and the the of the the with a her in the a the the and and and the and to the the readers know the of the that will on the and on the of with in Le Guin’s poetry. of poetry, are frequently the of her poems, and in one in of the Le Guin a than the more between the and In a poem of a a and the an and the into a that The poem with the the in the is her that the to the the and her in her and and and all her to the that long and the with the are the of the Guin was a We not be that her poems a for In the of her poem the I is she this with the of the and the of and aging. The poem in with published in Le Guin was The lines immediately her in / The poem want to or I just want to of the poem the the and a I want and I want I want you I to be a free is that, a free free free for the the of Le Guin’s was inspired by an in The of a of a of in an and by The is that the writing be to to the first of the in the the of his the of from the in The who the in Le Guin to to these So she of of poems in the poems that she on the little she the and to The the the and the of and are a these are the by the are the on the is the I to to to write in I to the make the was I was my I I am of the poems of Collected Poems is an Lao with of the and the the of a as a her in a but is for The opening lines take on the of a was a a a all a and take the on the little the the little a The is in the and that her also has a that he He the were she the and an and The to the where of the time the of the to have with the her she his with The to the The the the to the where she the to and a of the as as the the in the the with the with the and with the I you the my her in the all the are many to this is to the between the to her but as a to be the and are to be the who the to with his and with with In is the poem a of who the of to a of and that are of and know and own the from a to a to that is the but is more than she the the that with the of the of the a of The by the but in the there is a her in her with the her with the of the the and little and the on Le to nature, and her It to be and Le Guin’s as an to how of poems of Le Guin’s also perceptions of the person the the many poems to and one certainly to know how and poems of her and many poems in knowledge of her descriptions of in her but also to the of her empathy with Le Guin’s elegies and many published poems on with her first collection published she was and last to from and and in her final with poems in So Far, So in Le Guin’s profiles of the poems on and depth and from the variety of forms and she several poems the and in the opening of of to the of and and and that many in the the of the for to to Le Guin in were the of this of have been published in in the Poems I to Le Guin writing these the of before or after her are and in the and the the the Guin’s in poetry many In her I Le Guin with a in she on the with of famous of tribute to Le Guin’s is even more but her as the the the The a in the poem she the to and an who her a but not the is not take with of Le Guin’s poems the of in and of the who on in Always Coming Le Guin also to the of the and the and her tribute to a is a of this of poem and an of she her poems the poem Le Guin and a line to the of the / the detailed of the the as a complex and interesting the last example, the reader of the long from a little long and a of the and the of the poem she a of the that a poet or a The poem with and the of Le Guin’s of major the is a Le Guin the of the for her discover the variety of her of the who the of a and where will have or the who the on the have an by her with the that to this of and the to she has to the into a the of lines to create the of a to the of the and to create The of a as a I one the of a the from the long and was the a a as the of a into a is not as as Le Guin’s in that the of and word will not the poet to It was a word a / I to / and and The the but the not the the and the word my / and the of my / and reader by but by a by and you and know is is that the her or to be more the source of her the the The correspondence is possibly It is important that the the of the the defined in the the was the a of an with the of in would be and the personal would be to Le Guin the person is to know that was personal to that even with all her word and all to she in her poetry and Le Guin’s concept of nature, to know that the are in her of of the of Le Guin’s personal of is a the of to Many of her her personal and in Collected of in the of aging. Le Guin was she published her first collection of poetry. For many poets, would not a for a first collection. possibly her with that was from her first her final the to of In the introduction, Bloom to the poem of one of her final My of her poems do the of the passing of an important in these important to her In the the the of a to the Le Guin was a / and to the / who in with him / the and for was the of by and the Le Guin’s for her one of the poems, is more complex than the for as the lines is and is not is an inspiration and a you died in and and and that you to my I am and you I to I make the mythic My Elegy,” by Bloom are many The and the Le Guin’s to the range of not be that she the scope of she In poems, she elegies to of and In included in My as the she little that to would be the her a and with / and because of / an a but also an that the of for a the a from her The is are no / to So the has to to her no offers a more to a The a in the she in the the she how the to / the of the a that was the was her two of the and a time before her time a of her was a as was the the with a Le Guin of in Le Guin’s is one of her charged poems. It an for a time and an to the of her of that The poem and a Le Guin’s the of the Le Guin the poem a place of It is the of in the Le Guin would as a of a poem that and and a created to make a or of a of and own is the first of the in one but the the the to the personal poems in Collected Poems are of or for the of she was and is these are her poems of aging. In some of the poems, Le Guin in in Le Guin’s the as that am The is with that is / not for We do / in In of in Le Guin’s the has more she the of of the / of the of Guin sometimes to her as a person to her as an of these poems to her as an her to or even the In her she published in in the The me I the are is by her the long before you are / and how you that Le Guin have the poem with the not for all the but she to in this I assume that Le Guin this poem before the and all the her may have been but she was in the with more poem on aging. In her the of descriptions of and an create a portrait of aging. with, with a / my and / to the with this in the of the / and of / and a to in her Le Guin and the the In the many I / my my the of who have The of the poem is a and she those to free me from this of of and take me on the the the of the of her the for but that is is a that to the of the in is Le Guin’s poem and by a as is the with her to Le Guin offers many to including In in her Le Guin the of an The poem with a followed by a have my I have my / and I a The as the her into a and a that she will her a It and she is on a the of a the the and the be a of into a from from for this but is to the of Le Guin’s own aging. Le Guin’s an to the of aging. of the of the / in on the notes the of by / of by or The are / and the The into a to her have I not my and my / my of the the of this the from knowing that the of my and are The identity from and to am that that a the Guin’s in her in her My collection. approach to in and from her poems It is a of the a of and the of the of the and the of the of to her writing from poems of the the that to her she her and and for I have been with that those are all in a short poem of and to an opening of a little to and on the of a a poem to a that is all I Le Guin’s poem on aging. The poem the opening I was a of the to the to be I have been to be is also there is no for a a or a or a me to the in there a the in I I would for just a the and readers in Le Guin’s may the of reading Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected her and literary of nature, and that I have available in her expansive and My specific response is that Le Guin’s the passing of the literary and of writing elegies and writing charged personal with with depth and variety in the poems than in the more Le Guin in that the of poetry literary but the encyclopedic variety of forms be the poet that variety and as Le Guin My of Le Guin’s poetry skims the surface of her but offer a of forms and of her know Le Guin the and the person knowing her poetry, and you know the poetry or Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected you that you will Le Guin’s first a I the to that the is there deep the

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