Dan Beachy-Quick
The sun brightens the clouds before it breaks
them apart. On the far side of the ocean
there are marble ruins of the broken
temples: the temple each cloud is. Ruin
is faith's consequence—to house the force
that tears the house apart. The sun is
the yellow shield buckled on to the throat
of the sun-throated warbler—it says
with no words song's unspeakable fact.
Silence is faith's consequence—a world of
knowing that knowing is a world of not.
The book called The Sun held a fact one could love
but have no faith in. Close the book. Think,
thinker, in the dark. Moon—quiet the lark.
from the journal SENECA REVIEW 
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For the last many years I’ve been translating pre-Socratic philosophy simply out of a deep, long love for the literature—its refusal to separate poetry from philosophy from theology from natural science from mythology from astronomy. I love the weird, myriad one of it. Influenced much by Allen Grossman, I’ve also spent years thinking that each of us is also in the position of a “first philosopher”—that we must, each for ourselves, hazard a thought on how it all came to be: world, self, other. It’s especially sweet to have this poem appear today, the very day Milkweed Editions is publishing The Thinking Root, my translation of ancient Greek Philosophy.

Dan Beachy-Quick on "Final Lesson in First Philosophy"
Color image of a man declaiming poetry from a book, head cropped out
"ChatGPT Is Pretty Bad At Poetry"

"It’s not like ChatGPT is inventing this stuff all on its own—it's simply drawing on vast datasets composed of language written by humans to predict the next word in a sequence. The problem is that in aggregate, humans tend towards cliché....The human poems are marked by unusual and delightful images or turns of phrase. The ChatGPT poems are laden with sugary references to soaring birds, two hearts united as one, and roses wafting in a spring breeze." 

via VICE
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Cover image of the cover of Laila Malik's book, archipelago
What Sparks Poetry:
Laila Malik on "the organic properties of sand"

"In the petroleum economies of al Khaleej (as elsewhere), there exist micro-universes of so-called expats, a blossoming confusion of recent arrivals and longstanding, multi-generational clans, the newly affluent and then those others who live at the porous boundaries of the less desirable micro-universe of outsiders, migrant workers."
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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 in a short form—triolet, rondeau, rondelet. Work on it, revise it, sweat over it. Then bust out of the form. Resist closure at each line, resist repetition of lines, and expand to 2-3 times the size of the version in form. Then compress and move back into a different form, or not, but bring the poem down in size.
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