April 2012
122 posts
4 tags
Spinoza
Poem submission by innana.tumblr.com
A double yellow line
Our polar bodies
If not attractive
Then at any rate, convincing
The way you breathe
Is greed itself
Your nostrils widening
This is the main mistake
Everyone makes:
Confusing imagination
For intellect,
And collectively failing
To exhale
innana.tumblr.com
4 tags
Midnight Dew
Poem submission by thecityofrain.tumblr.com
An open canvas, shining gems,
Encompassed by the night.
Lustrous, twinkling specks abound,
Calling me in their light.
Bidding me to fancy them as
Things of soft silver made,
When hanging precariously,
They bend each tawny blade.
Begging me to imagine them,
As small fragile cocoons,
That are selfishly capturing,
The faint and distant moon.
7 tags
Marie Ponsot's "A Rune, Interminable"
Marie Ponsot, who turns 91 this month, still treads with sprightly step as she delivers her incomparable wisdom.
- Knopf Poetry Team
***
A Rune, Interminable
Low above the moss
a sprig of scarlet berries
soon eaten or blackened
tells time.
Go to a wedding
as to a funeral:
bury the loss.
...
4 tags
Untitled
Poem submission by viotron.tumblr.com
The soil was cold and wet on my skin. My chest to my knees; my knees to my chin. My thirsty roots drank milk dripped down from the plants I waited and grew with the snakes and the ants.
Suddenly daytime pried open my eyes The womb where I nestled pushed me toward the sky. My body displaced mud, bugs, grass, and earth. My head broke the surface as the ground...
4 tags
Invisible
Poem submsission by ariane-corinne.tumblr.com
the red
clashes violently
with the pink.
no one
even noticed
the difference.
4 tags
pyrotechny
Poem submission by eyezoffyre.tumblr.com
luminary-love the wild spirit of my cold winter winds becomes grounded and stationary in the heat of your fierce fever
you transform me I become the sky waiting on the day
this intricate secret of love blooms under my breasts into soft summer air filled with incandescent saffron rare and expensive expansive
I lazily toss my legs over the moon hanging,...
6 tags
Simon Armitage's "Sold to the Lady in the...
Simon Armitage’s latest volume, Seeing Stars, is a fascinating swerve for this lyric poet – while still emanating from the soul of Britain, this latest is a book of startling dramatic monologues, tall tales, and chillingly deadpan meditations by unforgettable people not unlike ourselves, stuck in the gears of an absurd modern society not unlike our own.
- Knopf Poetry Team
***
Sold to...
4 tags
Contrails
Poem submission by Stephanie Pushaw
Our compasses fail us again and again, leading us along the wrong magnetic fields, yet we sail still through quiet seas under the false mathematics of north. What the frontier means. Not conquering. Not masculinity, not like the blank box on a calendar, not the space between numbers on the face of a clock.
It’ll always be like this: the knots that tie me to...
4 tags
May Twenty-Fifth
Poem submission by Sarah Malone
On a day of naval thunder sailor-whites staring through Midtown traffic
I stopped for powder and a perfume the girl who waited on me did not know
In the station office workers hummed away behind a trumpeter I would have had to choose...
7 tags
Dan Chiasson's "Tree"
In a multi-part poem Dan Chiasson calls “Swifts,” the objects and entities who speak to us (a fist, a needle’s eye, a sound at 2 a.m.) have uncanny self-knowledge. Here is “Tree.”
- Knopf Poetry Team
***
Tree
All day I waited to be blown;
then someone cut me down.
I have, instead of thoughts,
uses; uses instead of feelings.
One day I’ll feel the...
4 tags
The Distinguished Gentleman
Poem submission by H. Margaret Slye
In the city in a house with a fireplaced den,
There lived quite the distinguished gentleman.
He awoke every morning at eight on the dot,
Browsed the paper, took his coffee,
With cinnamon—Just a spot.
He was well versed in botany, from willow to rose,
Wore little shoes in the garden,
To keep the dirt from his toes.
With presidents, princesses, and...
7 tags
Jane Hirshfield's "Perishable, It Said"
From Jane Hirshfield’s latest collection, in which time is the thief who steals from us – but not without some gain on our side, as below.
- Knopf Poetry Team
***
Perishable, It Said
Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
and below, in different ink,
the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.
I found myself looking:
now at the back of each hand,
now inside the...
5 tags
Poetry Month Begins with Jack Gilbert!
Welcome to poetry month! This April, we’re celebrating the remarkable career of Jack Gilbert, now in his late eighties, with a Collected Poems - here between two covers we have more than fifty years of his luminous awareness of pain and joy running together, his solitary, bittersweet, tough and at times enraptured voice. It’s nearly impossible to choose just one, but in honor of...
March 2012
3 posts
4 tags
1 tag
7 tags
