What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In our series Language as Form, we've invited poets to write about poetic language as patterned language—how words as sound, voice, sentence, and song become elements of form.
Spencer Reece
Shakespeare,
Jesus Christ
has a wallet,
a corsage,
nail clippers,
toe jam,
and armpits
like onions.
Seminary
forgot to
tell us.
O bookshelf —
where is
Steven Hobbs?
Forty-one.
Bile duct
cancer. Died
last week.
He published
one short story.
from the book ACTS / Farrar, Straus and Giroux 
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Front cover of Spencer Reece's book, Acts
What Sparks Poetry: Spencer Reece on "Veni Creator Spiritus"

“Grief the weather over my desk as I wrote some of these poems. Grief fogging up the windowpanes in particular poems. Grief came with its own weird chant, grief that strange emotion where you know what you miss before you understand why....In this poem, a young man dies. Like in the poem, his name is Steven Hobbs. The name engraved into my tombstone of a poem. The ambition of the poem? Remember Steven Hobbs. The labor of the poem? Love. The words my Doric column for Eternity."

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Color photograph of a seated Zoe Hitzig
Zoë Hitzig’s "Not Us Now"

"Zoë Hitzig’s newest, called Not Us Now, is a collection of poems written against—into the teeth of—the particular kind of algorithmic society many of us are now ensnared in. A society in which our moves are tracked and goaded by corporate systems for guiding behavior and feeling. Which makes for a culture of trending and buzzing, immediacy, and profitable smoothness. Hitzig offers a vision for another, freer, wildly alive, and compelling use for the power of numbers."

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