Thus far we have spoken
only the codes,
a litany of survival.
Thus spoke the silvered asphodel
next to the factory ruin.
Sound carries on water.
My subject is the wind.
To take umbrage at what a tree can do,
watching one single birch
become lightning stunning the sky.
Landscape is a made thing,
to see the mind seeing itself.
To see thought, a wing
in night, the long brooding.
Take it, listen, the night is orchestral
when the power's on.
Everything disporting.
A furred wand upon nothingness.

I get it, it was good to leave the world,
to find myself in thou.
There's a lot to be said
for seeing in the dark,
and more to the light
when there's nothing to see.
If I write about the moon,
it's because it's there.
I am landlocked, surrounded
by rivers and lakes, pills and leaves.
I saw a better life, it was far off,
sun on moss next to a friend,
the softening air, the dandelion fluff.
It was kinda real, and kinda not.
Can't see it today.

And out of nothing, breath.
A beast-like shadow in the glass.
If I brought back every feeling I had
where would I put them,
what could they mean
to this world on the floor?
It was best to let the moon unravel
and focus the truth of the music.
It was best to let the music
unravel and focus the truth of night.
Like when I found you
in the back of my mind.
I am talking about people
and the night.
People inside the night.
The night and what we are made of.
The things and the people.
The signal and its noise.
from the book FIERCE ELEGY/ Wesleyan University Press
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The first poem in each of my books is the first poem of that book. Once it comes to me, I can mysteriously begin to write the whole book. “Findspot Unknown,” is the opening poem of "Fierce Elegy," it is an archaeological term, and it allowed me to accept that the poem is indeed an artifact of an unknown origin. A “real” mystery as it were.
 
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Poet Joyelle McSweeney on Turbulence

"The mandate for gratitude abounds in our current moment. Every throw pillow demands it, every coffee mug, every tee. For many, gratitude is a guiding star, allowing one to correctly orient past to future, to keep one’s preciously assembled raft moving forward toward some shore./ But not for me. I cannot coax it from my throat./ And so I remain at sea, in turbulence."

via IMAGE JOURNAL
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What Sparks Poetry:
Brian Teare on Other Arts


"In exceeding the frame of visual description, ekphrasis in the expanded field refuses to dwell only on the surface experience of visual art—or film or dance or music. Going outside of the frame and beneath the surface, it engages with another art by reconceptualizing and recontextualizing it: in its historical and cultural and subcultural contexts, its critical reception, its making and materials."
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