Songbirds, Midwinter
Bill King
I live dead center in the Tygart River
Valley, which is expanding, now, with light.
On frog-pond ice, a chickadee tips
his cap each time he dips at the base of a leaf
that's billowed just enough, night-long,
to fashion a crack of water.
I did not always feel this way—or soon
enough—but when the mountains
begin to pink, I am a half-buried wick
that won't stay lit for long. Still,
everything glows. It winks.
In the rose, a sparrow whistles a tune
it took a full season for me to heed—
there's a time to be silent and a time to speak.
When I wipe my eyes, they've gone.
from the book BLOODROOT / Mercer University Press
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Mixed collage and illustration representing the audio and moving image treaures of modern poetry in the Woodberry Poetry Room
Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room Embarks on Digitization

Thanks to a $250,000 Public Knowledge Grant from the Mellon Foundation, Harvard’s Lamont Library will have the opportunity to preserve its historic "library of voices."  "The funding will enable the poetry room to digitize 2,000 of its most rare, at-risk reel-to-reel recordings and create a Library of Voices website, a digital AV platform on which the curators hope to explore fresh ways for visitors to engage with literary recordings in the online environment."

via THE HARVARD GAZETTE
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Cover image of the issue of the journal, Mercury Firs, in which Edwars Salem's poem first appeared
What Sparks Poetry:
Ian U Lockaby on Edward Salem's "Fullness"


"In Edward Salem’s poem “Fullness,” thought is derailed, not from the first instant but nearly, and in each subsequent instant the poem expands and contracts simultaneously in a dissent against time and space, as it leads us to a divine, non-existent anal inner mountain, where there is nothing (and everything) to be seen (at once). Operating intertextually with a Godhead in its poetics of negation, the poem manages, paradoxically, to build possibility through its persistent negations. Each time a line of argument becomes discernable, it’s quickly and forcefully wrought back around its own tail, creating coils of energy in refusal."
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