What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In the first series, The Poems of Others, our editors pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay. 

   for Dido
When you go away the wind clicks around to the north
The painters work all day but at sundown the paint falls
Showing the black walls
The clock goes back to striking the same hour
That has no place in the years

And at night wrapped in the bed of ashes
In one breath I wake
It is the time when the beards of the dead get their growth
I remember that I am falling
That I am the reason
And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy
from the book THE SECOND FOUR BOOKS OF POEMS / Copper Canyon Press
 
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share
Tweet
Forward

"The premise of 'When You Go Away,' is familiar: when the lover is separated from the beloved, the order of the world changes. Given the limits of this conventional subject, how did Merwin make a thing both faithful to its convention and new? I found an answer to my question in the complexity of the poem’s final lines: “my words are the garment of what I shall never be / Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.”
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
photograph of laughing Dionne Brand

For a second time, Toronto's former poet laureate, Dionne Brand, was awarded Ontario's Trillium Book Award for the province's best English-language title. Judges recognized her collection, The Blue Clerk, with the $20,000 prize, while honoring  Robin Richardson's book, Sit How You Want with the $10,000 prize for poetry.

via CBC
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
VCFA MFAs in Writing

Vermont College of Fine Arts offers a traditional low-residency MFA in Writing program along with a residential MFA in Writing & Publishing program. 
You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. 
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2019 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency