N E W S
ITALY TOUR DATES SET FOR APRIL 14-22, 2009. See the Italy Tour page for more information on this wonderful trip.
For more than ten years, we have been publishing an annual brochure, including notice of new books and CDs, the annual Letter from the House and David's public events and tour schedule. This fall, in spite of our love of ink and paper, we have made the decision to send it via e-mail. Unfortunately, we do not have e-mail addresses for everyone on our list, so we would like to take this opportunity to update our entire list - both e-mail and snail mail. We would be grateful if you would take a moment and send us your name, snail mail address, and e-mail by clicking here. We will only use your information for the fall brochure or to give notice of David speaking at a public event in your area.
David has just completed the manuscript for his upcoming prose book, The Three Marriages: Work, Self and
Other. We expect this new prose book to be published in January 2009.
In April, David received an honorary degree from Neumann College in Aston, Pennsylvania:
We welcome David Whyte, author and poet, whose work bears witness to the power within each of us to have a well-lived, well-loved life. {...} For his deep commitment to the hallowing of work life and unremitting hope in the face of change, his belief that we find the essence of our living "by hazarding our best gifts in the world," his remarkable achievements as a write of poetry and prose, and his contributions to constructive organizational transformation, Neumann College is pleased and honored to confer upon David Whyte the degree of Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa.
You can read some of David's most recent thoughts on work and leadership in the May, 2007 issue of The Harvard Business Review. The title of the article is "A Larger Language for Business."
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THE POET AS HUSBAND
I write in a small shadowed corner
in order to bear light into the world,
though the light is not my own.
My darkness is no darkness to you
and nothing you should wish upon yourself,
but my light shall also be your light,
in which we shall see differently
but gloriously. I am not lame inside me,
no matter that I drag my foot, I have run here
through all my infirmities to bring you news
of a battle already won. Let my last breath
speak victory into the world. The race is run
and shall be run again, joyfully, and you shall
run with me, the territory opened
to us like returned laughter
or remembered childhood. Remember,
I was here, and you were here,
and together we made a world.
- from Everything is Waiting for You
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LETTER FROM THE HOUSE
An ancient, much visited, but unverifiable human intuition says that we dwell not only in what seems like the immediate present but equally in a past peopled by those who have made us and a future for which our present seems to be but a slow preparation. In the very young child's face we have a sense, despite our daylight logic, of the unknown world from which they have come. In the steadily unfolding innocence of what happens each year we are amazed at the way our past seems to configure and reconfigure again, emerging each time with a willing imagination, as a new story. Our future changes according to the breadth of the story we inhabit. The days ahead are arbitrated by those that have gone before, but also, importantly, by the sense we are able to make of them in a revitalized present.
Past, present, and future live robustly together in River Flow: New and Selected Poems 1984-2007, as if everyone I ever knew and passed away were still alive; as if I had just begun to write, as if I had just fallen in love again, as if I still lived in the mountains of Wales, sailed the iron-bound equatorial shores of Galapagos or gypsied the high paths of the Himalaya. Childhood in these pages is just a hairsbreadth look over my shoulder or, in my present life, found in the small hours of the night carrying my daughter asleep. Even more strangely, looking back, it is as if the future had somehow already happened to the young poet who began a difficult but rewarding apprenticeship many years before the 1984 of the title.
To capture this wanton, eternal experience with time, I have arranged the book in an unusual way - not according to strict chronology, but according to flows or themes: Admonitions, Revelation, Remember, Home, Ireland, Himalaya, Writing, The Well, etc. are chapter titles which speak to a felt sense of flow in the work, running from book to book, where the writing of a poem often felt like rejoining a current generated by all the antecedent poems that had gone before it. There is, however, a solid, chronological table of contents for those who wish to view the work according to each book in which the poems first appeared.
As to the New part of the New & Selected, there are twenty-three new poems, most of which appeared fresh and new over the last two years, a few of which I have worked on for years, especially Who Made the Stars? - a poem, perhaps, for those who are willing to be pushed and pushed hard for thirteen pages but which after five years of work, I feel finally captures one of the defining experiences of my childhood.
Finally, I am very happy with the cycle of Irish place poems: Dun Aengus, Mameen, Tobar Padraic, The Seven Streams and Coleman's Bed, written as a series of admonitions as to how to shape ourselves as we approach geographical places and mythological stories that are precious to us. They speak to that ultimate fall, that other artful and difficult apprenticeship to which we all must come and which, ironically, we must learn while we are still alive;- that final disappearance which is the consummation of our previous, storied, life-long appearances.
A New & Selected Poems is a defining moment in a poet's life, no matter if the whole print run is thrown unread into the waters after which it is named. It says this is where I have come from, this is where I am now, and this is where, God willing, I am going. I hope River Flow brings you as much sense of journey, insight, and felt arrival as it has given me in the writing.
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