it has to keep
rewriting itself

like any virus

everybody wants to
get away from

the thing they know
they must encounter

before moving ahead
to the next level

i keep meeting people
who say

i don't want to
feel guilt


then feel
a higher thing

i think

it seems i meet
people all the time

who are simultaneously
fascinated by blackness

the exotic homegrown

and terrified at the coming
devastation of time

when kali comes on
the scene

we are bound
for devastation

no one can stare
the black literary
goddess

in the eye
and come out
anything other

than stone

yet everyone
comes out

as angels of dust
sometimes too

when world is
burning

such as now

in the medium of self-
immolation

no one knows what to be

so here come the
great black
twin flame

fidelity
a clutch of horns

tiny brass bits
of sound

morsels of clay

here come a
little static
light

for a spell
from the book SEPTET FOR THE LUMINOUS ONES / Wesleyan University Press
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I received this transmission while walking on the beach of the rugged Central California coast in my daily ritual. I was performing a public ceremony, when I felt the sonic overture of the poem reaching up from something underneath. It felt like a signal. The title is a splice of lines from Ntozake Shange's play "Spell #7" and something else I cannot remember.

fahime ife on  "i am like a radio, channel of my own"
Black-and-white photograph of W. H. Auden in his farmhouse in Austria
"Dust to Dust: W. H. Auden"

"In the history of poetry, Auden is a figure of recovery. Amid the fragmentation wrought by early modernism, declared by its practitioners and enthusiasts to be permanent, Auden revived and updated the lyrical forms of the prewar era. In some sense, he succeeded D. H. Lawrence, whose novels and lyric poems insist on the possibility of ecstatic love, of rebirth." 

viaCOMMONWEAL
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Cover image of David Ferry's book, Some Things I Said
What Sparks Poetry:
Heather Green on Language as Form


“In ‘Some Things I Said,’ David Ferry turns to his own work, his single-authored poems and translations, and draws forth a new poem in a new form, an elemental assemblage of fragments, lines sometimes presented almost exactly as they were in the source poem and other times altered.”
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