NaPoMo April 3rd – “an infinity of outcomes”

an infinity of outcomes Elliott batTzedek such fragility in stone if atoms began to unbond themselves my house would be dust or even mystery for a future Ph.D. dung heap missing walls, stone having become gas and if our planet’s protons, depressed by the state of things, go all negative on us we might find [...]

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Poets on Poets

Vladimir Khodasevich writing about Marina Tsvetaeva: Poets are not born in a country. Poets are born in childhood. What, then, is Russian about Marina Tsvetaeva? Tsvetaeva understood audial and linguistic work that play such an enormous role in folk song. Folk song is for the most part a litany, joyful or grieving. There is an [...]

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April 10th – I’m always trying to explain the world

I’m always trying to explain the world such a sham!        when I can’t explain even the simplest things like for example gravity, everything always falling, falling and I can’t begin to say why when I was a child I believed I could fly if only for one instant I could forget to fall which should [...]

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Translating Shez’s “in the nights”

Translating, round two, after help from Ann Ellen Dichter and Eugene Sotirescu. This is complex stuff, translating. Which I knew, but I just keep knowing more and more. In theory, I’ll have an entire manuscript of at least 48 poems by next year. In theory… First, the Hebrew original: בַּלֵּילוֹת הָאַיָּלָה חוֹלֶמֶת עַל נִמְרֹד גִּבּוֹר [...]

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April 3rd – Pain Poem #1

Sue has been living through really awful pain and as one way of coping asked me to try to start writing about the pain, all of its varieties and intensities. Writing gives me something to do when I see her suffering and don’t have much else to do, so I’m trying to find words for [...]

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Gaia, Dreaming by Philip Metres

From the amazing contemporary poet Philip Metres, whom I first heard at Split This Rock. Philip’s own poetry blog is:Behind The Lines. This poem is from the chapbook Ode to Oil, which you can buy from Kattywompus Press here Gaia, Dreaming Philip Metres She dreams she is body again. In the open field, sound of [...]

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Making a Manuscript—Structuring Intuition

Inspired by Michelle Ovalle’s description of her process, a few notes on my own, up to this point. I’ve no idea where the manuscript as it exists will go as I revise over the next few months, but at least I feel now there is something there, some key structural element. When I started last [...]

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So often now I’ve no idea

So often now So often now I’ve no idea who’s contained within this skin: woman, child (boy or tomboy), horse. Polar bears are said to shed their hides and live as humans; peel my skin and you could find a bear. What we are is merely social invention: white, female, human, dyke, all labels threatening [...]

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September nowhere near poem a day

If if one woman told the truth about her life, the world if I told the truth, the world would but I is world’s restraint or rather the illusion of I or rather the necessity of the illusion of I if we told about our life I would split open if one woman told the [...]

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Notes toward a poem about Hedda and Lisa

Having just read an amazing poem by Jane Mead about Hedda Nussbaum and Lisa (do we still in good conscious use the last name of the man who beat her to death??), I’ve been thinking on them all morning. These are very rough notes toward something, although nothing like the firm calm grasp of an [...]

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