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Michael Farrell
He lived before there was an air index
He chopped up Latin like a pickled vegetable
When he walked under a bird they stopped singing
like a light

His longest poems contained no words
He only picked up a lyre if someone else picked
up a paintbrush. He was prevented buying kelp
at markets

Whenever he crossed the road he
swerved like he was trying to sell a shirt with
the word ‘dirty’ on it, but only if the buyer cared
what it

meant. When in his room, thinking
about Henry VIII, he also wondered about the
best way to clean his clothes, and where he’d left
his key

Skelton had a large turtle that he
donated to a church park. Yet even after he’d
said his farewells, he would visit the turtle and
feed it

surreptitiously. He’d give bread to his
student before he thought of his own needs
And managed to find ways to survive the prince’s
parties
from the book GOOGLECHOLIA / Giramondo Publishing
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Color headshot of poet Jane Wong, holding flowers
"An Interview with Jane Wong"

"Oftentimes, when I would perform at poetry readings, I’d tell these little stories about what inspired a poem (such as growing up in a restaurant and being locked in the meat freezer). I started to realize that these little poem 'intros' were insights into much larger stories—stories that go beyond my own family, my own relationships."

via PEN AMERICA
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Cover image of Isabel Zapata's book Una ballena es un pais
What Sparks Poetry:
Isabel Zapata (Mexico City) on Ecopoetry Now


"I wrote the book Una ballena es un país (translated as A Whale Is a Country by Robin Myers), in an attempt to say what the language of the academy and the language of activism hadn’t allowed me to say....I conceived this book as an invitation to challenge the boundaries between action and reality, between poetry and essays and stories, between the role we think we play on this planet and the role that climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction demand we take up."
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