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 can see that the storms are coming
by the trees, which out of stale lukewarm days
beat against my anxious windows,
and I can hear the distances say things
one can't bear without a friend,
can't love without a sister.

Then the storm swirls, a rearranger,
swirls through the woods and through time,
and everything is as if without age:
the landscape, like a verse in the psalter,
is weight and ardor and eternity.

How small that is, with which we wrestle,
what wrestles with us, how immense;
were we to let ourselves, the way things do,
be conquered thus by the great storm,—
we would become far-reaching and nameless.

What we triumph over is the Small,
and the success itself makes us petty.
The Eternal and Unexampled
will not be bent by us.
Think of the Angel who appeared

to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when his opponent's sinews
in that contest stretch like steel,
he feels them under his fingers
as strings making deep melodies.

Whoever was overcome by this Angel
(who so often declined the fight),
he strides erect and justified
and great out of that hard hand
which, as if sculpting, nestled round him.
Winning does not tempt him.
His growth is: to be the deeply defeated
by ever greater things.
from the book THE BOOK OF IMAGES / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Cover of Edward Snow's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's book, The Book of Images
What Sparks Poetry:
Cynthia Arrieu-King on Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Man Watching”

"As I sat on the brick stoop reading the words, I felt a strange certainty, as if I were falling. I was hearing someone actually articulate a space for uncertainty, melancholy, and suffering that sounded current, electric. This kind of thinking is what I wanted. I had always wanted to see behind the look of things." 
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
Cover of Hanif Abdurraqib's book, A Fortune for Your Disaster
"Hanif Abdurraqib and the Performance of Grief"

"It is both bizarre and a little precocious to map a writer’s career while they’re still emerging, but Hanif Abdurraqib works fast, and we’d do well to try and keep up. Although it’s easy to treat his nonfiction and his poetry as distinct career tracks, he is quickly and efficiently building a single oeuvre bound by his enthusiasms, formal tendencies, and persistent concerns."

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