Every time I open my mouth my teeth reveal
more than I mean to. I can't stop tonguing them, my teeth.
Almost giddy to know they're still there (my mother lost hers)
but I am embarassed nonetheless that even they aren't
pretty. Still, I did once like my voice, the way it moved
through the gap in my teeth like birdsong in the morning,
like the slow swirl of a creek at dusk. Just yesterday
a woman closed her eyes as I read aloud and
said she wanted to sleep in the sound of it, my voice.
I can still sing some. Early cancer didn't stop the compulsion
to sing but there's gravel now.
An undercurrent
                that reveals me. Time and disaster. A landslide
down the mountain. When you stopped speaking to me
what you really wanted was me to stop speaking to you. To
stifle the sound of my voice. I know.
Didn't want the quicksilver of it in your ear.
                                What does it mean
to silence another? It means I ruminate on the hit
of rain against the tin roof of childhood, how I could listen
all day until the water rusted its way in. And there I was
putting a pan over here and a pot over there to catch it.
from the book THE SHARED WORLD / Northwestern University Press
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Blach-and-white headshot of a youthful Louise Gluck
"Early Teaching Diaries of Louise Glück"

"Glück’s teaching diaries were rich with wisdom and promise, and we share them now as a tribute to her singularly gifted mind. It is also our hope that by sharing her early teaching diaries, young teachers and writers will find something of themselves—their self-doubt and limitless potential—in a writer who, even in her lifetime, established herself as immortal."

via TEACHERS & WRITERS MAGAZINE
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What Sparks Poetry:
Nathan Spoon on Language as Form

"'I Have a Vision for My Poems' belongs to a series of Sylvia Plath found poems Nazifa Islam is writing 'to dissect, examine, and explore the bipolar experience.' The poem exemplifies how Islam is using this series to openly connect with a disabled ancestor, which is important because, while various cognitive disabilities have probably existed as long as humans have, the language to frame and see them as distinct embodiments and identities has not."
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