Yearly Archives: 2020

Mourning Must Not Overwhelm Gratitude – The Hard-Won Wisdom of Jane Hirschfield – Two Poems from Her Latest Book: Ledger and a Poem She So Likes by Gerard Manley Hopkins

My Debt Like all who believe in the senses, I was an accountant, copyist, statistician. Not registrar, witness. Permitted to touch the leaf of a thistle, the trembling work of a spider. To ponder the Hubble’s recordings. It did not matter if I believed in the party of particle or of wave, as I carried […]

The 2020 Recovering Words’ Virtual La Romita Poetry Retreat!!! Covid- 19 Kiboshed the On-Site Umbrian Version So We Meet Online Instead!

A Cento by Nancy Issenman Say Yes Sniff the naked page It is time to praise! white ash, sassafras so beautiful on the tongue waves of language across the skin (makes) all the world a page I have to say yes. I can smell this poem as one layer devours the next your calligraphic hand […]

Coda – The Water Keeps On Keeping On – Three Poets on Water – Lane, Diaz and Owen

LAST WATER SONG It was not the water you tried to find when you were young. That was the water that lost you. You climbed trees to look and the water was there. You walked on the earth and the water was nowhere. That was the losing water. This water is the finding water. It […]

Rivers and What They Carry – Part Two – River as Wound and Solace – The Continuing Journey Through Grief and Loss in the New Poetry Collection “Riven” by Catherine Owen

                  Come to the window — you call to me Come to the window — you call to me — I, wanting to sleep in, to detach awhile from the beauty but, also brood, and you know this so — come to the window, you say — […]

Rivers and What They Carry – Part One – River Poems and River Poem Sequences by Natalie Diaz and Catherine Owen

  Running the Rivers with N and C   — For Natalie Diaz and Catherine Owen How to write the unruly, the unsettled, words forever water, slipping past always and never, too quick for grief, too slow for regret, but you carry them, carry them, anyway. The beauty, beauty, carries them. Richard Osler, May 17th, […]

Patrick’s Poets – #4 in a Series – Linda Crosfield of Ootischenia, B.C.!

I Wish I Could Tell You, John Prine The time I saw you live you were opening for Arlo Guthrie but it was you I went to see. You played them all, your glorious songs, introduced an angel from Montgomery, showed us the tracks on a young vet’s arm, taught us a thing or two […]

The Great Gift of Women Poets – Another Poem in Memory of Eavan Boland (1944-2020)

Time and Violence The evening was the same as any other. I came out and stood on the step. The suburb was closed in the weather of an early spring and the shallow tips and washed out yellows of narcissi resisted dusk. And crocuses and snowdrops. I stood there and felt the melancholy of growing […]

Eavan Boland (Sept. 24th, 1944 – April 27th, 2020) – Your Poetic Marvels – Poems to grow Old In. To Die In. And Now Your Very Real Death – R.I.P.

A WOMAN PAINTED ON LEAF I found it among curios and silver in the pureness of wintry light. A woman painted on a leaf. Fine lines drawn on a veined surface in a hand-made frame. This is not my face. Neither did I draw it. A leaf falls in the garden. The moon cools its […]

A Look Inside the Surprising Heart and Mind of American Poet Carl Phillips – A Poem From His 2018 Collection Wild Is The Wind and One from His 2020 Collection, Pale Colours in a Tall Field

WHAT I SEE IS THE LIGHT FALLING ALL AROUND US To have understood some small piece of the world more deeply doesn’t have to mean we’re not as lost as before, or so it seems this morning, random bees stirring among the dogwood blossoms, a few here and there stirring differently somehow, more like resisting […]

For Now the Dunes Are [NOT] Sure – R.I.P. Glynn Irby, U.S. Gulf Coast Poet and Luminous Human

Imagi 31 In a ratcheting wind, salt grasses twist around November roots and the olive-hued saw palms throb against their crowns. For now, the dunes are sure. Yet, as sea-foam flashes white around their knees, the sand sinks with each tidal flow. Close offshore, waves rise from the flounder-gray Gulf and wind-driven crystals deflect into […]