Dan Beachy-Quick
antique dove I've long been student of
wings over vast water that never
with olive sprig exactly returns
and the ruinous waters never
drain down to the fundamental stone
I've found only ecstasy of
sea-foam and cloud and altering cloud
I call the mind of God is it time
of drawing shapes in plain air with sticks




the proper methodconfesses the facts

the sun's windowmoves across the sky

the body lives in time and blocks the light




the proper methodincludes dawn and dusk

the ancient thresholdsthe body steps through

to get further insidemyth dispels the mind




always-again goes the refrain
of the sun     it hurts the tongue to say
what's simple     for a long time I
thought thought was light digging its root
behind the eye   but I don't know
what happens behind the eye   my
solar confession   like flowers
faith   doesn't question     facts of days
from the book VARIATIONS ON DAWN AND DUSK / Omnidawn
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The poems in "Variations on Dawn and Dusk" seek to be an imitation so deep they becomes a form of participation in Robert Irwin’s “Untitled” in Marfa, TX. The poems are small replications, at least they are in my mind, of the squares of sunlight fallen on the concrete floor when I visited the building: 36 windows, so 36 poems, and 2 passages linking the 2 sides of the building. These poems occur at the transition from the dawn side of the building (painted bright white) and the dusk side (painted gray). 
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Color photographic portrait of Billy Collins at his desk, 2013
"There's a Quiet All Over the World"

Cheryl Strayed and Billy Collins discuss poetry, silence and the present moment. Collins muses that, "A poem about the virus might be an image of just a face mask on a curb, a discarded face mask. Just that one thing might be enough to tell the whole story."
 
viaTHE NEW YORK TIMES
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Cover of Theodore Roethke's Collected Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Allison Cobb on Theodore Roethke's "I Knew a Woman"

"I encountered Theodore Roethke’s 'I Knew a Woman' in my teacher Rebecca Shankland’s high school English class. We read it alongside Wallace Stevens’ 'Emperor of Ice Cream.' These were probably the first two poems I had read from the twentieth century. They made poetry seem a living possibility to me, not something entombed in the past."
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