What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, our editorial board members and invited 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. 
I caught wind of rains.



I watch the sun



get bitten into and as it goes
across the river
the cow chokes on a weed

— the green weeds.
The cow as they enter her.

The light here
is inconclusive.

We are inconclusive. A small event
in the bull's eye
of the path the moon
tracks, lugging its shadow along behind it.

In perspective, you stand in relation
to what you are looking at;
I thought I could hold
that moment at the edge of totality,
after the last desultory breath
and before the profound absence.
I wanted to.

The day was made longer by the shadow
folding itself over a folded
landscape of shallow-bellied rivers and

I thought I could position myself at the tautline
where the moon slipped in like a habit
to cover the sundisk. The birds

quieted.
Of the sun —

I wonder, is it a relief
to have something

between you
and all these sad worshippers?

Where does a gaze end when there is nothing to stop it.
from the book FRETWORK / University of Iowa Press
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Cover image of Michele Glazer's book, fretwork
What Sparks Poetry:
Rob Schlegel on Michele Glazer's fretwork

"In an explanation of the process the multidisciplinary artist Saul Melman uses in his Anthropocene Series (featured on the cover of fretwork) Glazer writes, 'The artist sets a process in motion, but the materials have the last word.' It's a deeply instructive metaphor for how Glazer allies with language to create poems that feel and sound as though she is tapping into a frequency just beyond herself."
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Black-and-white headshot of Elisa Gabbbert
Elisa Gabbert: "Capturing Beginner's Luck"

"The most interesting problems in writing can’t be solved—or rather, they need to be solved over and over, every time you write. You come to them each time as a novice. This is why I write about the same things over and over. I find I have not solved the problem. I find I have more to say."

via LITHUB
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