Michael Simms: The northern forests are burning
Here, 500 miles away
Smoke hangs over our valley
Michael Simms: Strangers at the Door | Robert Gibb, Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Jose Padua
Here I want to call attention to three mature poets who have done extraordinary work, but have not, in my opinion, received the attention they deserve, and in the process explore different ways one can be an “outsider” in the poetry field.
Note from the editor of Vox Populi
Dear beautiful people: You may have noticed that in the last few weeks some of Vox Populi’s posts go out to you as blank pages. Actually, the color of the … Continue reading
Michael Simms: Orpheus in Hollywood
Michael Chabon hasn’t so much straddled genres as rejuvenated whatever he touches, making literary fiction more engaging and accessible and popular genres less cliched and formulaic.
Michael Simms: Prospero needs a little nap
Vox Populi will endure, albeit at a slower pace.
Michael Simms: Hatred
I scythed, mowed, axed
hoed, trimmed, yanked
and eyed with vicious intent
this intruder eating my garden.
But the satanic bramble would not die.
Leonor Fini: Dreams of Women
“Paintings, like dreams, have a life of their own and I have always painted very much the way I dream.”
Michael Simms: The Witch’s Tower (excerpt)
~ the first two pages of a bound manuscript composed by the philosopher Linnaeus of Iskar in the reign of Ottolo the Befuddled; the rest of the manuscript being illegible having been damaged by water
Video: Vegan Poem
At the current turning point in our relationship with the earth, Federico García Lorca’s vision of the injustice in our mistreatment of animals is even more poignant.
Michael Simms: Daisy
After you died, I pulled a copy of Gatsby
From your shelf — torn, underlined, smudged
With marginalia — but still beautiful
In an unbound unglued sort of way.
Michael Simms: The Ruins
the air full
of transparent wings,
the fox crossing
the innocent road
full of weeds
Michael Simms: GUSHER by Christopher Soden
Learning to be oneself and to love oneself is the central narrative in Gusher, a remarkable book about a gay man growing up in Dallas, Texas in the 1980s.
Michael Simms: Sacred Sleep
My sleep is punctuated with terror
and excursions into weirdness,
and I usually wake in the dark hours
The Ancient Icelandic Saga Voluspo: “The Wise-Woman’s Prophecy”
Fast move the sons | of Mim, and fate
Is heard in the note | of the Gjallarhorn;
Loud blows Heimdall, | the horn is aloft,
In fear quake all | who on Hel-roads are
