"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and a chasing after wind": the Hebrew hebel, used 37 times in Ecclesiastes and usually translated vanity, means literally breath, wind, air, mist, vapor. Aria means, literally, air. This prayer-poem is a chasing-after-wind, wondering if the passionate words and music of a lyric poem are the empty wind of "vanity and vexation of spirit" or the breath of life God breathed into human nostrils to turn us from dust to a living being.
Bruce Beasley on "Aria" |
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Poets and Writers Looks at Some of This Year's Debut Poets
"Though these poets vary in how long it took them to find a publisher, ranging from four months to three years, and in their life experiences, from being a martial artist to a medical copy editor to a member of a post-punk band, these noteworthy writers find similarities in being no strangers to rejection, sometimes counting as many as forty-eight nos before that long-awaited yes. In handling the undulations of the literary life, Cariño tells us that 'instead of striving for some abstract capitalist idea of success, remind yourself that your work is not transactional. Let it bloom on its own time.'"
via POETS AND WRITERS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Eli Payne Mandel on Reading Prose
"As a poet and therefore complicit in the making of poems, I have tried to weasel out of this problem—the problem of poems in and against the world—by writing prose poems and poems about prose. Conventionally, the world is prosaic. It unfolds in ribbons of tweets and advertisements. Also: graffiti somewhere in the northern Italy. If my poems attended to and participate in this prose, perhaps they would tell me, or you, something about the crisis we call the present." |
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