This poem has a secret muse scenario. I’m thinking back to the day I hung out with Lakeith at the Oakland airport while waiting for a delayed flight. This was the first time we’d met so we talked about books and toxic waste and had a version of the conversation that’s in the poem. I was reading Kathleen Collins and her tone also helped set a tone. He had this upbeat sullen quality, the kind of person who can use the texture of his eyes or his silence to speak—a good actor. And with that mirror I wondered about lines and my own role-playing. The other muses here are joy and serendipity, the ability to surrender to a moment and let it fold out into its own private eternity that can be revisited as such. Between "black anguish" and "act(ing) stolen," all the stolen moments come back for retribution in those micro-eternities where we give in to unfamiliar impulses until they become a part us.
Harmony Holiday on "Black Anguish" |
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"Jana Prikryl’s Poetry of Perpetual Motion"
"Though its poems may not, at first glance, appear explicitly political—they are brief, loosely punctuated, and contemplative in their approaches to motherhood, middle age, and the natural world—they are works that, in their hyper-specificity of place and setting, actually undermine the grip that borders (of both the national and metaphoric variety) can hold."
via THE NATION |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Eugene Ostashevsky on Vasily Kamensky's “Constantinople"
"The Cubist language of the poem imposes cuts on words, fractures them into planes by repetition and variation, and recombines parts of words to build other words. Although the poem lacks a single order of reading—nor do we have evidence that Kamensky ever performed it out loud—it pulsates with sound repetitions. Repetitions convert its word lists into the sonic counterparts of Cubist planes, with each word turning into a formal variation of the one above it." |
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