Dorianne Laux

Dorianne Laux (1952 - ) was born in Augusta, Maine. She became a published poet only after years of hard hands-on work as a sanatorium cook, gas station manager, and maid. She began writing poetry when she joined a writing workshop at a bookstore in San Diego. “I was in my late twenties,” she recalls, “a single mother at a small family-run restaurant…I was in therapy and my doctor would ask to bring in my poems. One day he wrote down an address on a scrap of paper and suggested I go to this bookstore where poets gathered…it was here that I heard about night classes in poetry and signed up." She began publishing her own poems in 1982. Her sixth and most recent collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

It is the Poem.Box Anniversary! We begin our 4th year! We have had nearly 156 poems pass through. I think I missed one week but I don’t think I have ever sent out the same poem twice! :)  I start every year with a poem by Dorianne Laux because she inspired the box. She has a box at the end of her driveway or did some years ago. And to you, I want to say thank you. Thank you for joining me in this discovery of poems and poets. Such a joy for me to go in search of the poems and I always learn something new about our poets.

Night

The sky is thick with stars,

those sharp points of extinction,

those vanished firsts. And behind them

more stars, countless points

of departure, a carbon haze

of persistence, whales

sliding through grassy gases

grazing on clouds of krill,

inhaling stars. You can almost

hear it, their slow breath,

almost see their vague shapes

adrift, their rippled chins

skimming the galaxy’s

outer reaches, their massive

shadows echoing beneath.

— Dorianne Laux