Bells mark time, warn, call to prayer or action, mourn, stir, enchant the air, warn those on foot of what’s behind, announce real presence, open doors between floors, proclaim, “they’re off!” struck by a tongue, hung from a crown staple, pulled, shocked, rolled, rung.
That slant poet Louise Glück, feared, she said, fame rendered her like Longfellow, a popular poet, unserious, “a frog . . . to an admiring bog,” subtle as a bull’s bellow, less grand, more a grinding down than a bell.
Greg Miller, a professor emeritus of English at Millsaps College, currently lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. Now and Then Here and Now: New and Selected Poems is his most recent book of poetry (Sheep Meadow Press, 2022).
