Robert Gibb: Frances Perkins at the Homestead Post Office
Minimum wage, overtime, social security . . .
A storm of progress to the angel of history,
The debris of paradise scattered about
The aggrieved, beseeching crowds.
Michael Simms: A Conversation with Poet Robert Gibb
‘Having started out as a painter I’ve never lost the sense that I’m working on something that has a tangible existence, separate from my own, and that what matters most isn’t content but the expression of it.’
Jason Irwin: A Stillness Nearly Mineral | The poetry of Robert Gibb
A stillness which is very nearly mineral
Keeps insisting upon the essential
Loneliness with which this light is filled.
Yana Djin: The Dead Don’t Die | The Poetry of Dmitry Melnikoff
And they lie at the edge of light alone
at the place where snow never hits
Kahlo embraces Diego’s barebone
and they emanate heat.
Robert Gibb: Angels in Homestead
Pale, sentinel, their stone wings
Open behind them, they stood about
As though the afterlife meant
To impress itself upon us
Joan E. Bauer: W. Eugene Smith in Minamata, Japan 1971
Smith frames: Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath
The mother cradles Tomoko, her misshapen daughter.
Light through a dark window.
A post-modern pietà.
Jason Irwin: Landscape
See the men break through the early morning mistlike phantoms from a dream; their hat brims
pulled low, shirt sleeves rolled above elbows,
boots caked with last week’s mud.
Robert Gibb: A Paragraph for W. Eugene Smith
“The infinite mistake of Pittsburgh does not take from the fact that the set of photographs is among my finest.”
Jason Irwin: Smoke Rising
Back then to see dark clouds of smoke
rising above the housetops meant that God, in his wisdom and mercy,
was still on our side.
Michael Simms: Re-reading Christina Rossetti’s ‘In an Artist’s Studio’
The value of Rossetti’s poem lies in both the expert use of the Petrarchan sonnet, a particularly challenging form to master in English, and in the poet’s complex stance on the role of art in creating and re-enforcing images of women.
Kristofer Collins: A Poem for Michael Wurster
The only connection I felt to the mills
was to the children of a generation of flayed men
on unemployment, the storefronts boarded…
Michael Simms: Hands
Every man who works with his hands
Has seen that look. Maybe we showed up
To patch the roof, service the furnace,
Or unclog the sewer…
James Wright: Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me
The old grasshoppers
Are tired, they leap heavily now,
Their thighs are burdened.
I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.
Michael Simms: Dogsbody to the Muse
Sometimes it’s painful to watch a group of poets trying to work a room as if they were politicians. The AWP conference, as the wag put it, is comprised of 15,000 introverts pretending to be extroverts.
Vox Populi 