Poster poems: Farewells

And so a year has passed. When I started out doing these poster poems blogs, it was an idea whose time had come; people were posting poems and stories on the GU books blogs anyway, so what could be more obvious than to give these efforts their own home? I approached the powers that be with the idea and they couldn't have been more supportive. Initially we agreed we'd try 10 weeks to see how it went. Well, this is number 52 – so I think it must have gone quite well.

There have been literally thousands of poems posted over the year, by who knows how many individual poets, and it is these poems that have given the series whatever merit it may have. But everything, however good, must come to an end, and this is the final poster poems blog I'm going to do. Inevitably, the theme this week is farewells, and a rich one it is. The problem I have is which examples to leave out.

All kinds of poets have written farewells of all sorts; in one popular variety, the poet is saying goodbye to a place. In her Farewell to Bath, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu handles her goodbyes with a deft wit. For Wallace Stevens, saying Farewell to Florida means saying hello to freedom, so the departure is a welcome thing. The word "goodbye" becomes a moment of enlightenment in Gary Snyder's Saying Farewell at the Monastery after Hearing the Old Master Lecture on "Return to the Source", one of those poems where the title is as long as the text.