David Baker
1.

We came to the island. We stayed in the house.
Rain and sun. Bougainvillea. Pink cedar.
How many shadows slipped along walls
or whetted the leaves of century plants?

2.

We saw clouds from the windows. Far boats.
You left the bed and came back shaking.
Your mother, her white hair, or something
whose shape would never, at last, find you.

3.

Night palms clattering like hungry bowls.
Crazy whistling of the island peepers.
We walked to the water. Walked back.
We walked to the water . . . walked back.
from the book SWIFT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS / W. W. Norton & Company 
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To create stillness in a poem, I’ve learned to make tiny movements. To describe deep silence, I make slight sounds. “After” is a poem in the aftermath of loss, in the grip of absences and their ghosts. I hope these fragments—remnants—create the rhythmic suggestion of trauma. A further paradox of the art: short phrases, short sentences—not complex or long ones—move slowly. More silences: a more intense awareness.

David Baker on "After" 
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17th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival
January 18-23, 2021

We are pledged to create an extraordinary week of virtual poetry workshops and events for you in the safety of your home. Workshop Faculty: David Baker, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Traci Brimhall, Eduardo C. Corral, Vievee Francis, Kevin Prufer, Martha Rhodes & Tim Seibles, and more! Apply today!
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Forward Prizes for Poetry 2020

"British poets have won all of this year’s Forward prizes for poetry, with Caroline Bird’s 'audacious and erotically charged' The Air Year taking best collection, Will Harris’s RENDANG winning best debut, and Malika Booker winning for best single poem." Bird said of her winning collection, "Romantically, emotionally, mentally, I did not know what I was doing or where I was going, in all areas of my life. And the poems, as they came out, seemed to want me to land safely." 

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What Sparks Poetry:
Dan Beachy-Quick on "Alcman 89"

"Studying my declensions, conjugating those verbs, the endless rote memorization of vocabulary, all felt meaningful in relation to this wild, instinctive possibility—that thinking was the body’s work, that apprehension in all its senses (grasping, fearing, knowing) was the thinking poetry could offer, a thought that is a sensation, as natural and instinctive as the hawk’s dive is to hawk or the mouse’s hiding is to the mouse, all eyes bright with purpose."
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