This poem is a section from a book-length poem I'm writing called "The Commonplace Book." Composed of blank verse paragraphs gathered into 12 chapters, it was inspired by a line in Wallace Stevens: "The serious reflection is composed/Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace." The poem, a kind of epyllion or pseudo-epic, follows the year from my teacher's death to the first anniversary.
Maitreyabandhu on "The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness" |
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A Review of Song of My Softening
"Body image plays a central role in the collection's trajectory toward self-acceptance. Early poems highlight the many ways that both loved ones and society as a whole continue to shame people for the shape of their bodies. Toward the end of the collection, poems take on a tone of celebration, none more evident than the appropriately titled 'Body Image.'"
via THE POETRY QUESTION |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Emily Tuszynska on "Floodplain"
"Like Shepherd, I too was aware of myself as connected to the world in profound interdependence, an understanding that philosopher and biologist Andreas Weber refers to as 'enlivenment.' Every living thing around me had been animated by the same irresistible force, a 'wordless insistence' to which my body was now yielding, 'bowing / then kneeling / to each contraction as it came.' The force that was driving my daughter into the world was the same force that drove the tulip poplar's leaves to burst from their buds and their winged seeds to root themselves in the soil." |
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