Tirzah Goldenberg
 

The virtue of angels is that they cannot deteriorate,
and their flaw is that they cannot improve.

HASIDIC SAYING

a language of lore, of lure, of cleft, of where
the cleaving angels never cease
you knowing, continually sing . . .

a song of occulted singing, o I'd as lief
know as not by what earthly means
my friend . . .

my desire is simple
my dialect antique, but simple
don't the angels . . .

don't the angels with the aid of their hymnals
don't the angels with their twofold simples
seem a cure?
from the book LIKE AN OLIVE / Verge Books
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It's always challenging to look back at a poem and re-create the world you were in while writing it. I must have been interested in the mysterious language of the angels in Jewish tradition. But perhaps the most "occult" word in the poem is "lief," which I encountered in the novel Precious Bane by Mary Webb, a gift from poet Pam Rehm. Leaf-like, the word is earthly, yet its anachronistic value in the poem may be a doorway to angel-song.

 Tirzah Goldenberg on "For Pam Rehm"
Color photograph of Mia Ronn of Los Angeles California on stage at the Poetry Out Loud National Championship
Mia Ronn is Poetry Out Loud National Champion

"When asked what drew her interest in Poetry Out Loud, Ronn said: 'Performing a piece of writing can kind of connect you to it, to the text and to the poet themselves. You just can’t get the same understanding from reading a poem, no matter how many times you do, as you can from when you bring it to life.'"

via NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS
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Cover of the 50th anniversary edition of Gary Snyder's "Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems"
What Sparks Poetry:
Eric Pankey on Gary Snyder's Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems


"Stevens, one could say, shows us his work as he offers the proof of his equation. Snyder, on the other hand, allows each line, each image to stand alone, distinct, separate, and yet each is set to vibrating by the line or image next to it. Each thing is discrete yet part of a whole. I had yet to read Ezra Pound, to have explained to me the ideogrammic method, yet here it is enacted, embodied in this flawless ten-line poem."
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