Many will have mistaken a stranger for a parent, experienced the primal shock of misapprehension—and the fear underneath it: if not here, then where are our parents? I was separated from my father for seventeen years. We became strangers to each other. Yet time makes strangers of everyone. What is the fear (apprehension) and understanding (apprehension) that accompanies that reality? That’s what arrested me in this poem. Anni Liu on "Misapprehension" |
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"Poetry is a Variety of Mathematical Experience"
"Back in the days before discursive rationality and science ruled, we could perhaps hope to conclude that poetry is a kind of sacred mystery to us. Nowadays, though, counting the gaps and guesswork in our relationship to poetry threatens to cut us off from poetry, and cut poetry off from meaning. We perhaps need a little sacredness—I mean just the idea of something intimate and alien, necessary and surprising, intuitive and incomprehensible—to make a mystery different than a mess."
via AEON |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Melissa Kwasny on "Sleeping with the Cedars"
"Most of us are frightened of the future and grief stricken at what humans have done to the earth. As I see it, one of the unique tasks of poets, especially at this time, is to be in imaginative relation with the Earth. And to use language as a tool toward that effort. To have an imaginative—as opposed to an abstract or intellectual—relationship with the earth is to be in attendance to what Denise Levertov called 'other forms of life that want to live.'" |
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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!Part one: Write a long list of questions beginning “Are poems for…?”. Try to write one hundred, enough so that you can freely include what may feel trite as well as more imaginative or metaphorical renditions.
Part two: Take a walk somewhere you love. You are going to also write a description of something in the natural world, a description which may include what has been and what will be. You may write in prose or poetry.
Part three: Draft a poem in which you try to use the questions (Part one) to animate the description (Part two). Can you include ten questions? If five are changed to statements? Having used the questions (and statements) to shape the description, see if now you can cut some of them out? Do you have a poem? |
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