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Kit Fan
Halfway through my life
the reeds by Meguro River
where the ducks made love
stop whistling. I fear I've over-
inked, or the linseed oil
soured the sky. The wind
tastes of oysters grilled
over autumn soil.
A fish draws a ripple,
or did a raindrop win?
My papers will topple
the house before the tin
roof falls. I’d better make haste
and find a new address.
A long-legged fly by the watercress
skates upstream, brazen-faced.
What I need now, to change
the half-course of my life,
is to be struck by lightning
and survive it, like Hokusai.
from the book THE INK CLOUD READER / Carcanet
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2021 was a terrible year in my life, a difficult watershed. Day after day I looked at the clouds for ink, and thought of the great Japanese painter and print-master Hokusai, who was struck by lightning at the age of fifty. After surviving the high-voltage Hokusai entered a new era of his art and made some of his most memorable works.

Kit Fan on "Cumulonimbus"
Photo of Alice Notely
Nick Sturm interviews poet Alice Notely

"Early Works causes me to remember who I was writing them...I am remembering how deeply I felt during the writing of certain of the poems, it’s a depth of satisfaction that isn’t like any other—not sensual or triumphant over others, and I can’t get the right name for it at this moment. I’ve described it before... as a meeting of sense of artistic form and sense of reality, real life inner and outer. The form of poetry achieves that."

via THE POETRY PROJECT
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Brandon Shimoda's Hydra Medua
What Sparks Poetry:
Brandon Shimoda on Other Arts

"Dot and I were sleeping on the floor. Yumi was in the other room. It was raining and windy. We hung a furin, a Japanese wind bell, above our front porch, and it was ringing loudly, sweetly. It kept me awake, in a good way. I was content to just listen, then lines of poetry, unremarkable but quietly unrelenting, came to mind."
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