“Curiosity is not so much the practice, as the writing is the practice.” ~ David Keplinger

If you think poetry isn’t your thing, spend some time with David Keplinger.

David is the author of eight books of poetry and a professor at American University, in Washington, DC. We got to know one another through a humanities workgroup that was looking at how curiosity might be more effectively woven into the fabric of life at AU. He was a warm and profoundly thoughtful participant in the group — one of my favorites.

His new book, Ice, starts with the melting permafrost in Siberia, which has begun to reveal the bodies of 40,000 year old animals, from the last Ice Age.

The poems about frozen animals segue into poems about our own bodies under the “ice of forgetting”—and how the light of poetry, for him, melted that ice away and helped him remember.

“I’m always thinking about the material, and how the visual, oral, and rhetorical qualities of the form are in conversation. And eventually you hit it and you just know: that’s the one.”

Listen to Choose to be Curious #213: Poetry: Curiosity Emerging, with David Keplinger

Joanna Macy, an environmental activist, author, and scholar of Buddhism, wrote: “Keep watch for David Keplinger. His poems, with their exquisite immediacy and valor, confront us with what we need to see: our intimate part in the fate of our planet. Yet even in the anguish, we experience the beauty of it, and feel a kind of redemption in the truth telling.”

”Confronting us with what we need to see” feels to me like an ultimate invitation to the practice of curiosity, pushing aside what we want to see, or have been told to see, and resting with our full attention on what really is, finding the redemptive balm of truth telling.

It is what David calls “the mixed experience of mourning and wonder.”

I spent a weekend immersed in Ice. I think you’ll see why.

Find David Keplinger’s work here: http://www.davidkeplingerpoetry.com

Listen to my first conversation with David on Solitude.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Snow Melt” by Glacier Quarter, Araby, via Blue Dot Sessions.

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