What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, poets reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay.
Despair desires despair; desire
Despairs of desiring. Despair despairs
Of ever again desiring to desire
Despair, while desire desires
A form: a garden in the orthodox
Narrative, flowering ex nihilo
From April to October in the Roman
De la Rose, the Belle Epoque.
But what would happen if desire
Abandoned desire, desiring
In lieu of desire despair, an elegy
That would suffice to burn
The garden down? It was desire
Despair desired until desire
Fell into despair, built a replica
Of the garden it had only just
Yesterday burned: a copy of a copy
Now lost, complete with fake
Flowers. Not a fire, but gold leaf.
from the book APRIL / The Song Cave 
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Cover of Sara Nicholson's book, April
What Sparks Poetry:
Michael Joseph Walsh on Sara Nicholson's April

"Maybe what Nature and Art have in common is their amenability to being read—the fact that both can be the object of lectio divina, the contemplation of the 'living word.' In April the gods have left us, but Nature, like poetry, is being written, and can be read. The world is a poem, or a painting, and a poem, in turn, is the world, or at least a world (an 'imaginary garden with real toads in [it],' if you will)."
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Color exterior photograph of Courtney LeBlanc sitting on brick steps
New Poet Laureate for Arlington County

"Courtney LeBlanc has been selected as the third Poet Laureate of ArlingtonCounty. During her two-year appointment, the award-winning poet will serve as an advocate for poetry and the literary arts and will work to raise Arlingtonians’ consciousness and appreciation of poetry in its written and spoken forms."

via ARLINGTON VIRGINIA
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