"Kaveh Akbar on Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem 'Facing It'"
"When I got to my bed after school and cracked open Neon Vernacular, it was one of those great moments of epiphany one only gets a couple of in a lifetime (if one is very lucky!). I was a miserable teenager, ravaged mercilessly by hostile psychopathologies. Baldly: I had not felt particularly attached to remaining alive. But holding this book, this book of poems, looking at my backpack full of poems, I acutely remember thinking, ‘Well, shit, this is worth staying alive for.’"
via POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA |
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What Sparks Poetry: James Longenbach on William Butler Yeats' "The Tower""The series seemed to me scary in a way poems rarely are when I first read it in 1981; it seems if anything more so today. 'O what fine thought we had because we thought,' says Yeats, and a couple of months ago that iambic pentameter line shot out at me as it never had before: is thinking itself the part of the problem, the way we depict thinking in language, the way we’ve learned to recognize it?" |
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