What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In our series, Object Lessons, poets meditate on the magical journey from object to poem via one of their own poems. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay. 
Mary-Alice Daniel
One for busybodies
One for frying chickens alive
One for crying aloud in the night
      at the beginning of night watches
One for eating sweets with rice

One for butterfly collecting
—god, what an evil hobby—
gassing living things to itemize
      in your hovel in England

One borderline

One-bedroom disaster mansion
One black hole & bad experiment
One romantic Wow! after another
One forest becomes abundantly fell

One millihelen, the quantum of beauty
      required to launch One warship

One snatches us from fairgrounds, wriggling, out . . .

One sifts you into aerosol . . .
      a spray of rose oil pretty as powder
      adrift within waves of radio water

One downgrades bodies to zero status
      & wakes up whistling Dixie

One is a killing jar—
      even calls itself that

One of One desire—
      eat every animal
      in God's Good Claymation
from the book MASS FOR SHUT-INS / Yale University Press
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Color cover image of Mary-Alice Daniel's book, One Hell
What Sparks Poetry:
Mary-Alice Daniel on Object Lessons

"Science is one language articulating the esoteric fabric of spacetime. Verse is another valence. Astrophysics and poetry pair prettily. Both concern themselves with the behavior and spectacle of celestial bodies; with the margins of massive matters alongside the infinitesimal; the inconceivable infinite. Dreamers in the two disciplines speculate alternate & extra dimensions. We enlist anomaly. We trouble in stasis. We peer into—across—the reality tunnel: the entangled expanse between what you see and I perceive."
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Formal black-and-white photographic portrait of Rowan Ricardo Williams
Rowan Ricardo Phillips On Poetry and Process

“An attendee asked Phillips how he gets in a state where he can be honest with his emotions, knowing that others are going to see. 'When you’re writing, you can’t think about other people....The most important thing I find is to live by the syllable. When I’m writing, I don’t think about sentences, lines or words, I’m totally living by the syllable.'"

viaSTONY BROOK UNIVERSITY NEWS
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