What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fourth series, Object Lessons, poets meditate on the magical journey from object to poem via one of their own poems. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Landscape through which runs a river both sides lined with trees slightly therefore flowing green, the bells strung between follow in slight distance reflected on the panes of an orangery.
Landscape of evening shadowing the park Landscape of ventriloquist in nearby pavilion, the land itself a voice
of silence coming through a white sheet thrown over a chair—
Landscape of a sheet of sun made of bees.
Varda often focused on people often unheard—vagabonds, gleaners, cleaners, shopkeepers, villagers, with landscape framing—even enabling—character. Her last full-length film, Visages Villages, with the face of the entire French countryside moving smoothly behind, the one thing that binds all these otherwise disparate faces and places.
Landscape opening just like the faces going pale in the pouring light of ripe wheat blanchisserie of all is summer looking back in defiance at the camera. Landscape as history looking back too quickly, as history working at right angles to memory Landscape of history as the shade of an oak over a stream oddly resembling a folded paper boat.
“The object I’m considering is a landscape, which includes recognizing myself as part of any landscape that I’m engaging, whether I’m looking at it, remembering it, imagining it, or writing about it, and whether that landscape is the rolling hills of California, a painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, a video by Zenib Sedira, or an argument for public parks by Fredrick Law Olmsted."
The longlist for the 2020 National Book Awards in Poetry has been released. Honorees include Rick Barot, Don Mee Choi, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Mei-mei Berssenbruggeand Eduardo C. Corral. Several of the books observe "the violence of empire" and excavate "histories that have been forgotten or erased."
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