What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Language as Form, poets write about poetic language as patterned language—how words as sound, voice, sentence, and song become elements of form. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.
At the end, think of a wind
entering a kind

of garden. Opened, wind
enters a garden—what else could
whatever what wall

encircles be called—
listen to it ending, the draft
within earreach within.

Then consider the exterior.
Greened stone parts already
uncertain field. But there

is wall before. What I was
circling first, outer scarp
I had been returning from, another

part of unlevel field a
long defile assumed, revealed
as steep-sided ditch now

rendered abandoned by new
wall, something some straying
thing might look to hutch

up down in. Yes, what
went on was like that.
Foregrounded before. For

a stint, charted. What I
walked up and, inside
which, above which, walked.

This wasn't how I said I would,
at the end, go on. This is
what lure is, isn't it, revisiting

a shut perimeter. The gates
that can open not opening.
from the journal BAT CITY REVIEW
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Cover of Bat City Review
What Sparks Poetry:
Nica Giromini on Language as Form


"What drew me to terza rima in particular is the tension, or rather disagreement, manufactured by its braided structure of rhymes. Because each stanza is interconnected with both the following and the former, the borders of the unit of the stanza start to fray. And a productive tension—one parallel to that of the competing units of sense of the line and the sentence—emerges between the units of sense of the stanza and of the poem (across stanzas)."
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Headshot of Alice Oswald
A Conversation with Alice Oswald

"If a rose is somehow visible beyond the eye and if its color travels not along the nerves but along the blood and goes straight to the heart and if this fact cannot be proved but can be felt, like a hand moving around my chest with a torch, then the same applies to humans and that is what poems are trying to convey."

via MCSWEENEY'S
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