I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

One of the poets I discovered in college was H.D.

Born Hilda D. Liddle, she published under her initials.

I took a class on modernism, and we read H.D. and some of her contemporaries.

Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, among others.

I remember being wowed by her poems, which were experimental and strange, unlike anything I'd read before, and unlike anything I've read since.

One brief poem, Oriad, has stayed with me since that class almost 30 years ago.

Whirl up sea.

Whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our rocks,

hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fur.

The sounds, the way metaphor blends two landscapes, the sea and the forest, the poem thrilled me.

And I think H.D.'s work thrills the forest. The poem thrilled me. And I think H.D.'s work thrills the author of the poem I'm about to share with you, too. It addresses her from our contemporary world, and I think it does so

with music, strangeness, and verve that H.D. herself would admire.

Come back by Camille Guthrie.

Hey, H.D., come back. There's trouble all over. Ruins, as you said, there as here.

I need your flowering vision, lady. Come with your angels and blank book, with your elegant cheekbones, your loquent lines, upswept white hair,

lyrical, long fingers, and dark wool cape. As I'm reading the news, help us, we filled the oceans with the plastic crap we like to buy.

Choked the sea nymphs, let loose toxins into the sky.

The land is parched.

The poles are melting. My friends are canning food and buying guns.

I have serious doubts. I have two children. You had one. Perdita, the lost one. We live in the country and drank water, poisoned by a chemical

factory nearby, so people could eat microwave popcorn and make omelets with non-stick pans. It's not that bad. Our blood levels are

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