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.
July energies in the air float like an oily zeppelin
around around around with no friction but time

hubcap swirls like a broken deer upside down on the street
red and blue and white and night and the wheel, the wheel

pause slides in the warmth, drop-down a weird January air
passage opens between my ribs as I probe into

car crash wheels hum above glass crystals surround
blood and glass light and blood light and glass and red-blue light
and sirens and hands and blood and a belt and a cut and hands
and fall gently and cheek on glass that is not sharp but blood
blood drop in my lashes blink red and blue light white moon snow
glass in the dark in the red in the blood in the skin in the scar

Summer wheels spin. Bang. Howling lights outside, vibrate glass.
Read the Detroit report in the café, a drop of absinthe swirls water

veils. Beat. Outside, the rain. Coffee smells mingle with fried onions.
Hip bones sink and anchor on wood. Light rhythms paint the window.

My gullet is empty, endless, a void slick with ground glass festers
into pain, pulls me into time river, moonlight sucks down to snow.
from the book DIVER BENEATH THE STREET / Wayne State University Press
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Cover of Diver Beneath the Street
What Sparks Poetry:
Petra Kuppers on Language as Form

"In the case of 'Split/Screen,' the magic structuring principle of 'fourteen' hovered in my brain. The sonnet is a device I often use, not necessarily as a formal frame but as a couplet structure to hold against my freewrite. This offers a scaffold toward something that can spread out on the page and take up space in the world."
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A picture of Vassar College's Thompson Library
"Vassar Exhibit Examines Life of Elizabeth Bishop"

"Bishop's poems and short stories would go on to win nearly every literary honor and prize in the United States, including a Pulitzer. That said, she wasn't a particularly prolific writer, publishing only a handful of books in her lifetime–and unlike some of her contemporaries, like Robert Lowell, Bishop didn't incorporate many intimate details from her life into her work. Patkus says that's part of why Bishop's correspondence is so important: it gives scholars a glimpse into her personal life."

via WAMC
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