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. 
Gwendolyn Brooks
Carried her unprotesting out the door.
Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her,
That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,
The lid's contrition nor the bolts before.
Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise,
She rises in the sunshine. There she goes,
Back to the bars she knew and the repose
In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes.
Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge.
Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,
Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks
Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks
In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge
Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.
from the book THE ESSENTIAL GWENDOLYN BROOKS / Library of America 
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Image of a pop cultural reference to Yeats' poem in the TV show, "Devs."
The Apocalyptic Appeal of WB Yeats's "The Second Coming"

"It would be unwise to claim that 'The Second Coming' is more relevant than ever because that has been said so many times before. If it feels especially potent now, perhaps it is because we have become painfully accustomed to the idea that progress is fragile and it is all too easy to fall back. In an age of shocking reversals, Yeats’s theory of historical cycles—'day & night, night & day for ever,' as he once put it—rings true."
 
via THE GUARDIAN
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Cover of The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, showing the poet at her typewriter
What Sparks Poetry:
Hadara Bar-Nadav on Gwendolyn Brooks's "the rites for Cousin Vit"


"Poetry is attention; poetry demands attention. We feel the breath of each word as it is given to us. And here is this stunning and vibrant poem by Brooks—a poet who is no longer alive writing about a person who is no longer alive. And yet as I read it, we are all very much here, present through Brooks’s attention to language and our careful listening."
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