This poem began in Hermanus, South Africa in December 2017 and finished in Milan, Italy in winter, 2020. There are 91 extant drafts in my files, not including the initiating drawings in my sketchbook. It expanded to many stanzas with a tighter rhyme scheme before much of the extraneous detail, including the bleached coral and kelp stipes it started with, finally washed away.
V. Penelope Pelizzon on "Cliché" |
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Jorie Graham: "Notice All That Disappears"
"For more than four decades, Jorie Graham's poetry has documented the complicated, multidimensional, ever more uncertain sallies of human perception into the bristling presence of trees, birds, streams. Virginia Woolf followed Mrs. Dalloway and others over the course of 24 hours in London. Graham, whose lines are Woolf-like in their walks about the page, tracks a minute in the life of a raven."
via THE ATLANTIC |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Karen Leona Anderson on "Rat"
"To write vermin is to ask then who makes them faceless and liquid, seething, scheming, malicious, too much, over and over; who feeds them and then turns away, repulsed. (Was it me? Of course.) It’s to ask who is at home, inside; who is outside. Why vermin are women’s fault and their shadow, their shame and their labor, how making vermin is so much work to do and undo and who that work is for." |
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Write with Poetry Daily
This April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, we'll share popular writing prompts from our "What Sparks Poetry" essay series each morning. Write along with us! Write a poem that slips between past and present tense, noting how the poem changes as you shift verb tenses. Or, write a poem in past or present tense first, and then select certain lines to shift back and forth—it may be that only a single verb tense will differ from the rest of the poem. Or, take the draft of a poem that you’ve abandoned and toggle between verb tenses to see if you can break open new meanings and feelings in the poem. James Shea |
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