September 1, 2020 – 10:25 pm
from Find the Poets Find the poets, my friend said. They will not speak of the things you and I speak about. They will not speak of economic integration or fiscal consolidation. They could not tell you anything about the burden of adjustment. But they could sit you down and tell you how poems are […]
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February 8, 2017 – 8:56 pm
Epigraph from Motto In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing About the dark times. Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913-1956, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, Eyre Methuen, 1976 This gorgeous, difficult, heart-breaking world. What do we poets do with it? Brecht says we must sing about it. His […]
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August 27, 2016 – 10:07 pm
BLACKBERRY EATING I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost […]
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Two Years Two years of my sister’s illness; the wind whips the river of her last spring. I have burned the beans again. Muriel Rukeyser (1913 – 1980) from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, McGraw Hill, 1982 Strange, for me, how poets and poems move like flotsam on a river. Is […]
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March 29, 2015 – 11:25 pm
My Mother’s Foot The main door into the nursing home slides open, an exhalation of stale air. The gift shop still has hand-knitted toques and scarves for sale, though it’s the first day of Spring. There is a leather chesterfield and matching love seat. […]
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DAY The hens, startled, open their beaks and freeze in that style, immobile —I was going to say immoral— their mandibles and ruddy crests, only the arteries pulsing in their necks. A woman spooked by sex: but liking it much. POEM BEGUN AT THE END A body wants another body. A soul wants another […]
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January 4, 2014 – 7:54 pm
IOWA, JANUARY In the long winter nights, a farmer’s dreams are narrow. Over and over, he enters the furrow. Robert Hass (1941 – ) from Time and Materials, Ecco Press, 2007 When I Sleep When I sleep the birds come to the garden With their gifts of seeds out of ice. Last year’s leaves of […]
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April 13, 2012 – 11:42 pm
The world of dew is the world of dew. And yet, and yet— 1819 Kobayashi Issa from The Essential Haiku – Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa, The Ecco Press, 1994, edited and translated by Robert Hass In my search for poets whose last name started with I, and there aren’t many, trust me, I […]
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