What a merchant’s mouth was saying A legal pad A trespass Severed cables from the hacked-off shoulder The blast furnace forging
golden tokens By “regular” I mean “maintained” By “astonished” I mean “greatly disappointed” The intricate intoxicating wrappers pressed and
saved I arrive late to the christening Thank God not too late Wooden birds nailed to the dry birdbath My marigold in a half-pint milk carton cut with
rounded scissors My orphan marigold offered depleted dizzying in fragrance My punctilious marigold hallucinating its bursting My
shivering perfunctory marigold I’m dehydrated Thank God this valuable item will make me well again These drained out colors will
heal me Aromatic essence captured from the lingering mists You called me back You wrote me back on fine linen letterhead Your missive arrived You
responded to my inquiry You liked my posting in the local circular You said “I hear you I love what you’re saying to me right now I love what you’re saying—”
from the book TIME BEING/ University of Iowa Press
Virtual Event: The Cheuse Center and Poetry Daily will be hosting a monthly virtual event Friday evenings at 8:00 EST. We'll feature a moderated conversation between four poet translators, as featured on Poetry Daily. Our second event will be Friday, December 18th, featuring Matvei Yankelevich, Taije Silverman, Johannes Göransson and Jonathan Stalling.
Carol Rumens finds an "authentically joyous work" in Harriet Monroe's 1922 poem. "Monroe steers us towards the heavens rather too readily, perhaps. But it’s a charming perception, and further contributes to the grounding in nature of the passengers and all their artificial, early 20th-century modernity."
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"The most influential genre of Classical Chinese Poetry is called ‘regulated verse’ (各路诗), and these forms gather the world into words and refold them into inter-resonant patterns on a cosmological scale. Each monosyllabic word must be stacked in relation to the one before and after, above and below until the whole rests upon a final balanced point, as relaxed and exact as a cairn of transparent quartz."
