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. 
The kids are shrieking at the edge of the pool,
their angelic faces twisting. They like
to shriek—they like to make the Great Dane bellow.
When he cannot stand it any longer, he jumps
the wall and chases them, still screaming, in.

And under all this now a steady grating—
a plastic bottle of blue cheese dressing
scraping up against the concrete gutter,
bobbing off the aqua, sun-flicked waves
the kids have made by jumping.

And there's a man here from Afghanistan
who hasn't cut his greasy hair since he was driven mad.
His name is Simon. He looks just like The Christ.
Walks up and down beside the pool, oblivious
to screams and barking. He gestures as he talks,
whispers and pontificates. No one is listening.

Lord, is the general din of the world your own?
Something that is good in me is crumbling.

Early this morning I walked out into the vineyard
where the sun hits the sunburnt grapeleaves
and the dusty grapes about to be harvested.
I felt something light then—the skittish joy
that is also a falling off from the world
to that place you can get to by fasting.

Simon marches by, then stops—and looks
at a stretch of bright green grass:
        "Is that shit?
        I thought so.
        I have been here before.
        They always hide the horses though."

What holds me here destroys me as I go.
from the book TO THE WREN: COLLECTED AND NEW POEMS/ Alice James Books
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Cover of Jane Mead's book, To the Wren: Collected and New Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Jenny Browne on Jane Mead’s “The Lord and The General Din of the World”

"Can a description of an empty bottle of blue cheese dressing change your life? I wouldn’t have wagered it, but I never forgot that “steady grating” and how Mead’s poem pointed the way forward. Because I didn’t know you could put stuff like that in a poem, by which I mean the stuff my actual life felt made of, let alone hold it right next to God, whoever she was. I had thought being a poet meant I had to learn to write (and see) like Rilke, but now I thought maybe I might try to be (and listen) like Jane Mead."
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Head shot of Delmore Schwartz
"The Enigma of Delmore Schwartz"

"Delmore, in the classic tradition of the Harvard outsider poet, and like his hero Eliot, turned down his degree. He declined to take his Masters because he could or would not pay off his fines at the Widener Library. He was restless to write and publish and achieve literary fame, and had reams of manuscripts under his belt after his time at Harvard."

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