Kate Northrop
Outside after a bad dream —no stars,
no canopy of leaves— just streets

and down those streets, like large
flat rocks in the middle of a stream, my neighbors' houses.


•

But sometimes, walking around, straight ahead
on sidewalks, I correspond with arguments

swimming at the heart of houses, and move parallel

to their interiors: old clothes, crates,
canned peaches —everything

sinking to the bottom of the bottom of houses.


•

Rain, starting slowly, thuds

the metal bottom of a boat— a sound you know in the middle
of the night in houses. And there's a current pulling

at the boat, the movement of debt— we do not

own these houses.


•

Often I am brushed on the leg —right in the kitchen!—
by a fish, yet my sisters trust the integrity of houses.

Lately I'm happy to be having the sex I am having
most often now, inside of houses.

Those tiny, inquisitive sea horses, flickering
here and there— how they addressed us we will remember in houses.


•

Later, like an allowance, the moon comes round: fat, white

Later the moon floods
the alleys, empties the rooms of our houses.


•

How I know I am not happens most often in houses:
creaking the floorboards, slowly breathing in houses.
from the journal SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW
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“Jittery Nocturne” is made from many voices. In class, we’d read Agha Shahid Ali’s “Ghazal: To Be Teased into DisUnity” and talked about ghazals, about repetition, and asked how, as poets, we might respond to history not ours to own. In the middle of the semester, the pandemic scattered us. The rest of the spring, I walked around a lot and felt I was trying to hold onto people in houses, and to the houses themselves. Like they were buoys.

Kate Northrop on "Jittery Nocturne"
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Head-and-shoulder detail from a black-and-white photograph of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf
"What If?: Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot"

"Eliot was writing his obituary for Woolf while also drafting 'Little Gidding.' Both the poem and the obituary caused him great difficulty. Placing the two together, with Eliot’s Hale letters on hand, allows us to see the regret for a lost friend in the poem, where the obituary fails."

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Cover of R. W. Franklin's book, The Poems of Emily Dickinson
What Sparks Poetry: 
David Herd on Emily Dickinson's [I Dwell in Possibility —]

"The poem’s possibilities are many. You feel them at every turn; in every space held open by her signature dash. The windows are numerous in this house because the poem’s meanings shift, each word opened to the range of its definitions. When she occupies in the final stanza–when she states her “occupation”– we see her in her self-appointed role as maker of poems."
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