What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Ecopoetry Now, invited poets highlight poetry’s integral role in sustaining our ecological imagination. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Lindsay Turner
the hawks are a-nesting
storms in the evenings
no the hawks are re-nesting
the forest is gone

they clearcut the forest
the smell of black plastic
the forms of displeasure
circling the lot

prescient bright winged things
big iridescent bubbles
the forms of displeasure
blow over like storms

what you need to understand is
it's systems not people
the bright formal nothings
go rising up the hill

it's systems not people
it's braided with pleasure
phthalates and parabens
circling like drones

what goes in the new space
are you the new girl
like rotted out rope strands
the rope hollow at the core
from the book THE UPSTATE / University of Chicago Press
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Cover of The Upstate
What Sparks Poetry:
Lindsay Turner on "Forms of Displeasure"


"In The Upstate, I was trying to connect the regional experience of a place, a certain corner of Southern Appalachia, with the bigger structural issues of America of 2016-2020, roughly, and of the world. I was trying to do this in poems because it’s also what I was trying to do in real life, struggling against the claustrophobia of depression and anxiety as well as of certain region-based patterns of writing and thinking."
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Headshot of Annelyse Geiman
"A Conversation with Annelyse Gelman"

"Vexations is enacting individual memory on a cultural scale. Information is neither stored nor retrieved in a logical, linear fashion. Memories become vivid in some places, barren in others—and memory itself, as we know from decades of research, is unstable and fundamentally unreliable: 'Persistence of and confidence in a memory is no guarantee of its accuracy.'"

viaTHE ADROIT JOURNAL
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