What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our third series, The Poems of Others II, twenty-four poets pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay. 
4.

I think I shall end by not feeling lonesome
only scoured by the lengthy light of everyone.
Nice, fine milk, the best of all milk.

Balancing the persuasive long pole
of friendship on a stone,
I think I shall end by not feeling lonesome.

I have lived and eaten simply.
I have leaned against the shape of handsome choices.
The almanac conceals a pasture you would like.

The universe is cast in consequences.
Draw my name in milk on canvas.
I doubt I shall and by not feeling lonesome,

But this is outrageous:
Come buy my ground ivy, come buy my water cresses.
The ink is wrong, but a battered almanac is not a heartless almanac.

But is it time to combine and speak out?
The day gazes helplessly at time.
I think I shall end by not feeling lonesome,
The pamphlets yellow, the milk also: the milk, the fine milk.

from the book THE WINDOWS FLEW OPEN / Burning Deck Press
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Cover image of Marjorie Welish's book, The Windows Flew Open
What Sparks Poetry:
Prageeta Sharma on Marjorie Welish's "Some Street Cries"


“In Welish’s work I saw an embrace of the most wild, abstract and observational in Stevens, informed with her renewed freshness in constructing the image and its possible abstract correlative. She creates her own set of notes in her poems. Her book The Windows Flew Open broadened my universe of what the poem could be and hold as its subject: a language fueled from living in the mind."
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Cover image of Deryn Rees-Jones' book, Erato

Sandeep Parmar shares  the best poetry collections of 2019. "Often poems conjure an event, a lyric occasion marked by stillness and observation. But in a year characterised by frenzy, political anticlimax and uncertainty, poetry should afford us no such luxury. As the American poet Robert Lowell wrote 'history has to live with what was here, / clutching and close to fumbling all we had.'"

via THE GUARDIAN
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