On Inhabiting an Orange by Josephine Miles
More in the ‘see what jumps out of the anthology at you’ series. Again, from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.
Josephine Miles was born in 1911 in Chicago. The link will take you to her biography. Her academic and writing career is more impressive given that Miles suffered debilitating arthritis for most of her life, making it impossible for her to use a typewriter. Her poems were committed to paper using a pen, in movements that were “slow and painfully deliberate” according to an oral history recorded by Ruth Teiser and Catherine Harroun. They conducted interviews with Miles in the late seventies under the title Poetry, Teaching and Scholarship.
This poem – On Inhabiting an Orange – was written in 1935 when she was 24 years old. She died in 1985.
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