In the Sine-Saloum Delta
Quan Barry
Anytime one of the four of us—me, Masser,
the captain, his helper—leaned sideways,
you could feel it tip, your body
kiltering toward the place where on land
you would've fallen, the thing five meters long

and a little over a meter wide. I tried to imagine
fifty others crowded aboard, then fifty more
if the pirogue were slightly larger,
some with every important thing in a single bag,
others with just their souls clutched

to their chests, which is to say
their children. Masser says in the beginning
it was just boys, teenagers stealing a boat
at night and heading for the open sea,
Spain's Canary Islands a thousand miles away,

or maybe to Libya and then onto Italy.
And still they go, he says, though 4 out of 5 will die—
death by water, death by hunger, death
by lack of water, death by lack of a compass, death
by the hope of a hundred desperate people

and too little space. On the radio,
the most popular entertainer in Senegal
sings, "Last night in my dreams, all over the world:
food for all. Ça, c'est necessaire," he concludes.
In the pirogue on the relatively glassy waters

of the Sine-Saloum delta, I lean east,
and the four of us lean east. Then someone leans west,
and whether we want to or not
we all lean west toward the setting sun.
from the book AUCTION / University of Pittsburgh Press
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Color craphic reading 1970s, including headshots of leading poets of the decade
Carl Phillips on the National Book Awards 

"When I bring all the poetry lists of the 1970s together, I can’t deny that a considerable diversity is represented in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, social class and poetics. The lists suggest a country grown restless with inequality, ambivalent about war and not yet clear as to how to reconcile a sometimes reluctantly admitted need for change with an understandable fear that to evolve from tradition might mean losing that tradition forever."

via THE WASHINGTON POST
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Cover image of Timothy Donnelly's book, Chariot
What Sparks Poetry:
Matthew Tuckner on Ecopoetry Now

"Donnelly’s work has always been in conversation with Keats, but it is here, through Chariot’s strictness of form, that Donnelly broaches on what Keats called the 'egotistical sublime,' the notion that there is a direct correlation between 'voice' and environment. Form molds and directs the thinking in these poems, “This Is the Assemblage” included. Yet form also becomes a stricture to push against in these poems, further articulating the question asked by Whitman that Donnelly enlists as the book’s epigraph: 'to be in any form, what is that?'"
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