What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Ecopoetry Now, poets from Canada, Mexico, and the US engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the author and an excerpt from their essay.

We were in a world, in a world, in a world. Sure, we had our glyphs, but we were providential. Once, some alphabet believers, glass purveyors, Ursus Arctos killers, sent all bailiwick on cursed course far faster gyration backspin, birling intrinsic angular momentum—boson melts. Spinning, it careened away iceberg, iceberg, iceberg; glacier braced time traced yesterday unshakable base—all below flushed alluvion torrent, Niagara pour, special spate, flux, flow, until their coastal citadels moldered from cyclone, tsunami, hurricane gale. Tornadoes tossed turf wherever they pleased. Eruptions molded Her back into something She deemed worthy. Not to mention quakes. And the people, the people, the People, pushed into cataclysm, a few generations from alphabet book imposed catechism, soon were calamity tragedy storm splinters, fragmented particles of real past, in a world gone away from oratory, song, oraliteratures, orations into gyrations reeling. Soon hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. Hot, dying mangroves, disappearing Waimea Bay, dengue fever, butterfly range shift, meadow gone forest, desert sprung savannah, caribou, black guillemots, bats, frogs, snails—gone. What will sandhill cranes crave? Winged lay early. Reefs bleach. Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, snow, snow, snow, fires flaming fiercely, fascinated in their own reflecting glare. Marmots rise early. Mosquitoes endure longer, lasting biting spreading West Nile. Polar bears quit bearing. Robins, swallows, enter Inuit life. Thunder finds Iñupiat. Here, it is said, glyphs left rock wall, stone plates, bark, branch, leapt animated into being, shook shoulders, straightened story, lifted world upon their wing bone, soared into Night, to place World back into socket eased sky—stilled us. Some say the soup leftover was worded with decolonized language. Some say the taste lingers even now.

from the book STREAMING / Coffee House Press
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
Cover of Allison Adelle Hedge Coke's Book, Streaming
What Sparks Poetry:
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (Riverside, CA) on Ecopoetry Now 

"Awareness of what we are part of, an element of, an organism within, is essential to knowing oneself and one's placement. There is duty inherent to place; balance, sustenance, reciprocity, preservation, protection, beingness, belonging to or being a good guest within. Every step taken has impression. The wonder of magnitude, from dust mites to star dust all over everywhere. What is illuminating, challenging, holding instruments of knowing brings song, language, reason, purpose, poetry."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
Cover of Yanyi's Book, Dream of the Divided Field
"Quiet Revolutions: Yanyi's Dream of the Divided  Field"

"As such, there's a sense of glimmering unreality to Yanyi's poems despite how mundane their subjects seem to be. Across the book's five sections, in slim lyric and prose poems totaling no more than eighty pages, Yanyi captures how frail our relationships—with family and friends, to our bodies and our homes—can be, the small ways they unravel." 

via THE RUMPUS
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2022 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency