September 6, 2022 – 7:38 pm
A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck — Ilya Kaminsky from A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on its Way to the Neck from Deaf Republic, Graywolf Press, 2019 […]
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(All artwork images in this post with permission and Copyright David Blackwood Inc.) On July 2nd, the nationally and internationally acclaimed Canadian/Newfoundland artist David Blackwood(1941-2022) died at home in Port Hope, Ontario. He was eighty years old. But his artistic voice will continue to speak through his body of work that will likely rank among […]
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February 26, 2022 – 7:49 pm
Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of […]
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In a series of synchronistic events a poem I wrote has come back to me more than thirty years after I wrote it and almost twenty years since I had disavowed it and forgotten it! I had forgotten that a dear friend, Sarah Wilson, copied out the poem in her distinctive and wonderful script with […]
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January 2, 2021 – 6:55 pm
An Erasure This thing happened, a virus, yes, but more, than a virus…the mighty kneel, the world halts, trying to stitch future to past, refusing the rupture, the rupture, this terrible despair, a chance to rethink the dooms worse than a pandemic. Imagine a portal, a gateway. We can drag carcasses, prejudices and hatred, avarice, […]
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September 8, 2019 – 2:49 pm
THE DIVINER Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick That he held tight by the arms of the V: Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck Of water, nervous, but professionally Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting. The rod jerked with precise convulsions, Spring water suddenly broadcasting Through a green hazel its […]
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Two Poets Divorce I want Cohen! No, I want him. You take Dickinson. No! I want Wilkinson. OK, OK, take them. I don’t care. Just leave me Gilbert, Ginsberg, Hass, Hirschfield, Hoagland. and Hughes. Grass is greener when Whitman sings it. Take that! And Plath. But I want Wah, Wallace ,Williams – C.K.,W.C., and Hugo. […]
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February 7, 2019 – 4:11 pm
This Morning, a Yellow Wheelbarrow I hear the chords, the deep thrum, from a yellow wheelbarrow on its side after snow in a morning garden. The light singing there, yellow on yellow, blazes, an incandescence not dependent on anything or anyone. Richard Osler, unpublished I don’t as a general rule post my own poems on […]
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Today like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love Be what we do. There are hundred’s of ways to kneel and kiss the earth. Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273) from The Big Red […]
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