The afternoon light across the pond
is doing a good job today, the sky
a gray smudge with a trace of puffery
but the trees stand out in perfect clarity
and here I am, and if I weren't
I wouldn't know the difference,
just as, say, Shelley wouldn't.
"O sky and song entwinèd in a wild embrace
and hid asleep inside the human race,"
he might have said.
It's good to think of Shelley
as a person and not
the great Romantic poet
who died at thirty tragically,
Percy a young man gifted and serious
with a big heart and an open mind
who wrote some mediocre poems
and a few truly great ones.
Every night I read a few and try
to see him writing them, but
all I get is a dim view of the back
of a man at a table in a chilly room in Italy,
his arm moving slightly,
and in the flickering candlelight a woman
with a sleeping baby in her arms.
From time to time the baby says "Umph"
and another sheet of paper flutters down
with flowing, glistening words in black.
Shelley is on fire tonight.
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Head shot of a laughing Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown on "Doing Good Work"

“They were calling out to me in ways that I couldn’t stop,” he shared. “I was writing poems on elevators, pulling my car over to get poems written down....It was a moment of inspiration that I was so grateful for, but also completely exhausted by.”

via GEORGIA PUBLIC BROADCASTING
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What Sparks Poetry:
Mathias Svalina on William Blake's "The Tyger"

"Maybe my dedication to poetry....this desire to manufacture transcendences out of words, is just chasing this first high of visionary realization & its predicating brain chemistry. One moment you can be a child in a classroom, terrified & trapped, & then you read the right words, & you are free. It’s true. Freedom is real. Art is true. And once you know a true thing, it is difficult to un-know."
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