The golden-crowned sparrows have been present outside our kitchen throughout the pandemic. Their songs have been so sweet. This is also a sort of eco-poem because the pleasure is undercut by the anxiety about wildfire. There are often interwoven impulses of poetic tradition in my poems, not isolated threads. Like the golden-crowned sparrow, my husband also has thick eyebrows.
Brenda Hillman on "On Hearing the Golden-crowned Sparrow" |
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"Short Conversations with Poets: A. E. Stallings"
"I love thinking about diction: sound, vowel-music, syllable-count, etymology, register. I’m always particularly pleased when I get a word in a poem that is unexpected, that I haven’t used in a poem before, or that is rubbing shoulders with words it wouldn’t usually hang out with. I suppose the king of that is really John Ashbery. But I don’t want the word to stick out like a sore thumb, either, I want it to be the natural and precise word, but surprising because it is in a poem."
via MCSWEENEY'S |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Robert Pinsky on the Favorite Poem Project
"I think of Emiko Emori’s video of a Cambodian-American high school student reading 'Minstrel Man' by Langston Hughes, David Roderick’s video of a bomber pilot who served in Vietnam reading Yusef Komunyakaa’s 'Facing It' at the Vietnam Memorial, Natatcha Estébanez’s videos of a U.S. Marine reading 'Politics' by William Butler Yeats, and of a construction worker reading from Walt Whitman’s 'Song of Myself.'" |
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