Writers on Writing Bonus Feature: “To a Poet, Recently Silent” by Linda Pastan

In compiling our Writers on Writing issue (Summer 2025), we discovered a number of essays, poems, and stories that explored topics central to the literary life. We are including on the blog some additional pieces from the Prairie Schooner archive.

“Washing My Hands of the Ink,” a 1991 essay by Linda Pastan (1932-2023), appears in the new Writers on Writing issue; here is Pastan’s poem about poetry, “To a Poet, Recently Silent,” which appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of Prairie Schooner. The poem references Claude Monet’s painting, “The Studio Boat (Le Bateau-atelier),” which we also include here.

“To a Poet, Recently Silent” was reprinted in Pastan’s collection, The Last Uncle. Pastan won the Mademoiselle poetry prize when a student at Radcliffe (Sylvia Plath received honorable mention); she went on to win the Dylan Thomas award and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Among the fifteen books of poetry she published in her lifetime were The Five Stages of Grief and A Dog Runs Through It.

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To a Poet, Recently Silent
by Linda Pastan

1.

Have you run out
of words? Like this tree
which relinquished
its bronzed leaves
one by one, have you
used up everything
you had to say?
Or is your silence
music in the mouth
of someone
who has simply decided
not to sing?

2.

Syllables and years
in old and stringent patterns
both run out so soon. 

3.

In Monet’s Studio Boat,
which you sent us to see,
the unresolved shadow
in the bow could be you,
writing your poems in perfect
privacy, then sending the dark
words floating down the Seine
to be washed in water
until they shine like fish scales.