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.
Virginia Woolf: Becoming an Artist
Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
John Samuel Tieman: Variations
I heard the history
of the Huberman Stradivarius
how it was stolen and painted
with shoe polish to hide it
Lynn Emanuel: Some Notes on Intoxication and Simile
If my mother had not been an alcoholic, I might not have been a poet.
Louie Skipper: How did John Keats breathe
Where is the bronze statue to the drunk
who shared a cell
in the Concord jail with Thoreau?
Yahya Frederickson: What I Learn About Poetry in Yemen
Sana’a What I learn about poetry in Yemen, I learn at a sidewalk café off Zubairi Street, one of the main streets in Sana’a named after the poet who fomented … Continue reading
Clarissa Pinkola Estés: The Four Rabbinim
One night four rabbinim were visited by an angel who awakened them and carried them to the Seventh Vault of the Seventh Heaven. There they beheld the sacred Wheel of … Continue reading
David Huddle: Composition as Ethical Inquiry
A man who has faith, intelligence, and cultivation will show that in his work. –Walker Evans I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always … Continue reading
Al Maginnes: Source
Out of sore feet, out of roadsides sooted with dusk, out of gravel, jeweled crumbs of shattered glass, out of the wide gesture of the hand toward heaven, out … Continue reading
Djelloul Marbrook: The donnée as entry to the temple
A crucial point in the making of some poems, especially long ones, arrives when the poet must decide whether to push through a kind of caesura in the process. That’s the … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Poem
I can’t help but write it, get up in the morning and there it is. Useless, worth nothing on the market. No piece of oil field technology, nor can it … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: A Brief for the Defense
The other night I was eating dinner with some friends and the conversation turned, as it does these days, toward the coming apocalypse. There was some talk about Victory Gardens, … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: Images
One powerful image can overthrow the whole decaying edifice of empiricism and thrust us back into the medieval mind of gods, miracles, witches, and the wonders of an empowered and … Continue reading
Stephen Dobyns: Ducks
For David Fenza Warm in my truck by the lighthouse at Watch Hill on a sunny morning in mid-winter, I observe the ducks bobbing among ice-covered rocks and think of … Continue reading
