What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Other Arts, poets write about their experiences with other art forms and how those experiences have resulted in the making of poetry. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Bodies practice in the park.
I watch. You would. Cued,
flocked, avid, drastic, dressed in black,

they throng over desiccated turf,
behold shrubs like lovers, jog
backwards in a pantomime of shock

rewound, hunch and bob with T-Rex
wrists, then tumble back to earth.
They are going to be experts

in it. Ecstatic, desolate, their faces
are a rapt line fleeting as the ghost
left behind by a cursor on a page deleted

or unwritten. You know, I've heard
that some people are still trying all
alone to make things that no one else has ever

thought about before. How
I couldn't say. Around us,
grackles sleek themselves

into arrows that zing away
and back, chattering,
singing it.
from the journal ANNULET
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Cover of Annulet #2
What Sparks Poetry:
Robin Myers on Other Arts

"I stopped to watch a group of people doing something odd and beautiful together on a patch of dry grass. Was it a dance improvisation workshop? An actors' warm-up? I couldn't tell, but it felt special to see them doing it. They drifted around and moved their limbs, interacting sporadically with their surroundings and each other, in a way that felt both spontaneous and coordinated, both public and private. Both practiced and unfinished, even unfinishable. They used only their bodies, no language at all."
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Headshot of Lindsay Turner
"Lindsay Turner on The Upstate"

"'Season of contentment / of the beast:' The Upstate is very much a book about a season in my life, in the way people use 'season' to refer to a longer period of time than just a season. In time, I've begun thinking it of a season of contrasts held in simultaneity, a season of lived contradictions: loving and hating, making a home and being terribly estranged, feeling despair and contentment at the same time."

via POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA
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