What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our third series, The Poems of Others II, twenty-four poets pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay. 
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).
from the book COLLECTED POEMS OF THEODORE ROETHKE / Doubleday
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Cover of The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
What Sparks Poetry:
Allison Cobb on Theodore Roethke's "I Knew a Woman"

"I encountered Theodore Roethke’s 'I Knew a Woman' in my teacher Rebecca Shankland’s high school English class. We read it alongside Wallace Stevens’ 'Emperor of Ice Cream.' These were probably the first two poems I had read from the twentieth century. They made poetry seem a living possibility to me, not something entombed in the past."
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Black-and-white photograph of a graveyard
"In Railsplitter, Maurice Manning’s newest collection (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), he has taken on the voice of Abraham Lincoln to talk to readers about poetry, attention, and civilization....This new collection, though, features Manning’s trademark historical focus with a sharpened edge, as he interrogates the people and ideas that birthed this strange and mystical country."

via THE ADROIT JOURNAL
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