NPM 50 State Tour: Virginia

Virginia is for lovers...poetry lovers.

The tenth state, which signed on 6/25/1788, has a Pulitzer Prize winning poet laureate to brag about.

Claudia Emerson won the 2006 Pulitzer for her poetry collection The Late Wife.

Her most recent book, Figure Studies, is on my to-read list. Emerson's website says it opens "with a twenty-five-poem lyric sequence called 'All Girls School,' offering intricate views of a richly imagined boarding school for girls."

I love how Emerson's poem "Stable" is a kind of elegy for her state's rural roots.

Stable

by Claudia Emerson

One rusty horseshoe hangs on a nail

above the door, still losing its luck,

and a work-collar swings, an empty

old noose. The silence waits, wild to be

broken by hoofbeat and heavy

harness slap, will founder but remain;

while, outside, above the stable,

eight, nine, now ten buzzards swing low

in lazy loops

You can find the rest of the poem at the Poetry Foundation.

Virginia may be for lovers, but I love New York. The Empire State is up next on our National Poetry Month 50 State Tour.

Just don't tell them that the Statue of Liberty really does belong to Jersey.