What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In The Poems of Others, invited 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.

Wanda Coleman
she kept it in a green felt-lined box
liked to bring it out to show people, especially the men
she was sexually involved with
it was a creature she loved
sometimes when she was alone, she’d take it from its box
caress it gently, lay it on the bed, watch
it glide easily over the blanket
frequently she would feed it a mouse or small rabbit and watch
for days, until the lump in its torso dissolved
it was more than a pet
of course, she never saw herself in it
she felt she had so many more dimensions
she was warm and it was cold
people loved her but they were afraid of it
the only thing they shared was a blackness of skin
and a certain rhythmic motion
one day she was showing it to this man
a very special man
a man she wanted to fall in love with who
seemed to be able to love her, a man different from
the other black men she had known
and so she opened the black green felt box
reached in and took it out
gently she carried it over to the bed
where he lay naked and waiting
she showed it to him proudly
he was appalled, shocked, frightened
he jumped. he scared it.
it took a long time for that lump to go away
many times since she has considered getting rid of it
but after having invested so much time in the thang
she couldn’t bear to throw it away
a friend suggested she sell it
she’s into the process now.
from the book WICKED ENCHANTMENT: SELECTED POEMS / Black Sparrow Press
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Cover of Wanda Coleman's Black Sparrow Press pamphlet, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag
What Sparks Poetry:
Dana Levin on Wanda Coleman's "The Woman and Her Thang"

"Standing at the magazine rack at Beyond Baroque, I opened Coleman’s chapbook at random and read: 'She kept it in a black green felt-lined box.' Ten monosyllabs—how I loved saying them, each one a kind of floating stone in the mouth—introducing the speaker’s 'thang': seductive and dangerous, wreaking havoc on her love life."
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Color image of The Folio Book of War Poetry
Andrew Motion Edits The Folio Book Of War Poetry

"Sassoon is one of the best two or three known poets of the First World War....the most successful poems that he writes are very often these shortish, squiblike-seeming poems which are savagely satirical, very often, of the people who are in charge of the war at the same time as they are very tenderly remembering or shielding those who are actually fighting in it."

via NPR
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18th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival
January 10-15, 2022

We are pledged to create an extraordinary week of virtual poetry workshops and events for you in the safety of your home.
 
Workshop Faculty: Kim Addonizio, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Chard deNiord, Mark Doty, Yona Harvey, John Murillo, Matthew Olzmann and Diane Seuss. One-On-One Conferences with Lorna Blake, Sally Bliumis Dunn, Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, and Angela Narciso Torres. A special Craft Talk by Kwame Dawes. Special Guest Poet: Yusef Komunyakaa. Poet-at-Large: Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
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