"Hurry"-- A Poem About a Young Child

Marie Howe, our new State Poet, was inspired by her preschool age daughter to write the following 2008 poem:

Hurry

By Marie Howe b. 1950 Marie Howe

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store

and the gas station and the green market and

Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,

as she runs along two or three steps behind me

her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.  

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?

To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?

Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,

Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—

you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.  

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking

back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,

hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

 

Marie Howe will be inaugurated as New York's official State Poet on Thursday, September 20 in Page Hall on the University at Albany's downtown campus.

 

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Writing Life: I Wake to a Screaming Toddler

Lauren Groff, who visits the Writers Institute on Tuesday, March 27, describes her normal day in a 2010 New York Times interview:

"I wake to a screaming toddler, go for a run to keep the screaming toddlers who live in my head at bay, eat a hasty breakfast of eggs and coffee, and go out to my wee little space that my husband carved out of the back of our garage. We call it a studio, but that’s being kind. I have very indifferent temperature control back there. It’s a swamp in the Florida summer, and in the chilly winter I lose the use of my hands after two hours. So I take many, many trips inside for coffee or popsicles, depending on the season. Once in a while, I’ll look up to find skittering across my desk a palmetto bug — which, as everyone knows, is just high-euphemism for cockroach. And skinks! There are tons of skinks in my studio. I love their little pulsing necks." More.

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