Yearly Archives: 2018

My Poetry Retreat in Umbria a Week Away! But First: A Poem from Last Year by Tonya Lailey

Outrider her soul goes ahead to Umbria a slow traveller on horseback by boat in turns sends a note home after a few days don’t worry I’ve prepared a place for you there’s a hook for your coral necklace a bedside perch for your notebook a casement window open to a line for drying your […]

For Sunday Three God Poems – Akbar, Tsvetaeva, Crozier

American/Iranian poet Kaveh Akbar Learning to Pray My father moved patiently cupping his hands beneath his chin, kneeling on a janamaz then pressing his forehead to a circle of Karbala clay. Occasionally he’d glance over at my clumsy mirroring, my too-big Packers T-shirt and pebble-red shorts, and smile a little, despite himself. Bending there with […]

With Death Looming, Two Astonishing Poems of Presence – Mandelstam and Stafford

AND I WAS ALIVE And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear, Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree. It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power, And it was all aimed at me. What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth? What is being? What is […]

Tom Crawford – R.I.P. – 1939-May 2018

How to Draw a Better Bird Resist eloquence. Get mad. If your bird is the snowy Clark’s Grebe, if that’s your bird, the one out there sitting on its eggs in a floating nest – stunning bird, serene bird – if that’s all you see, then it’s no good. You might just as well take […]

Lorna Crozier – Her Mouth to the Lion’s Mouth – Next Week, Her Latest Poetry Collection Arrives

FALSE GODS These are the ones who show up at the party, grains of rapture bagged and tucked up their sleeves, heaven’s golden mead in flasks in their secret pockets. They’re everyone’s best nightmare. They sit in the front of the club, stuff the biggest notes in the G-strings of the strippers. At the gym […]

When Poetry Arrives – Neruda and Urrea

Poetry And it was at that age . . . poetry arrived in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don’t know how or when, no, they were not voices, they were not words, not silence, but from a street it called me, […]

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) – Part Two of a Two Part Series

……something that I think poems do, is observe the world and make it new again. Kevin Young (Poetry Editor of the New Yorker) from The New Yorker Poetry Podcasts, July 27th, 2018. The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt worn river-smooth all round, a cylinder with blunt round ends, […]

More on Ursula K. Le Guin – Part One of a Two Part Series

In class, she said, “We writers are the raw nerve of the universe. Our job is to go out and feel things for people, then to come back and tell them how it feels to be alive. Because they are numb. Because we have forgotten.” In class, she said, “We have forgotten our rituals. Out […]

The Silences That Move Us To Speak – Ilya Kaminsky’s Poetry

Search Patrols I cover the eyes of Gena, 7, and Anushka, 2, as their father drops his trousers to be searched, and his flesh shakes, and around him: silence’s gross belly flaps. The crowd watches. The children watch us watch: soldiers drag the naked man up the staircase. I teach his children’s hands to make […]

When Death Came She Was Ready – A Deathbed Poem by Anna Swir

Tomorrow They Will Carve Me Death came and stood by me. I said: I am ready. I am lying in the surgery clinic in Krakow. Tomorrow they will carve me. There is much strength in me. I can live, can run, dance, and sing. All that is in me, but if necessary I will go. […]