Deborah Doolittle

A few years back, when I presented my poem “Katherine Mansfield’s Geraniums” to my critique group, one member thought I should start a series of poems pairing writers with flowers. Eventually I did, focusing on writers, like Katherine Mansfield, who inspired me. My method was relatively simple: I picked a writer and paired them with a flower. To accomplish this, I perused their work looking for floral references. In the case of Mansfield, I had perused her journals and discovered her complaint regarding English geraniums. If that method didn’t produce a satisfactory flower, I used the writer’s name and initials to discover any interesting correspondences between writer and flower. I also studied their writing style and chief subject matter. After that, I imagined them in relation to the specific flower and saw what happened.

I call these poems “posies”: poesy as the art of poetry, and posy as a small bunch of flowers. I have written nearly three hundred posies, some of which are published in my book Floribunda.

The poem published in PHQ, “Linda Pastan Revisits the Espaliered Pear Trees,” was born from her recent death. She was a poet I greatly admired and considered a role model. When I learned that she had passed away, I revisited her works and came across a poem in An Early Afterlife that discusses espaliered pear trees, and I wondered, if she had returned to those pear trees, what further thoughts might have occurred to her. I added my own memories (as if they could have been hers) of a pear orchard that I passed when I walked to and from my school bus stop, letting vague religious references swirl around the experience as Pastan had with the original poem.