Influenced by a form of “Sangam” literature called akam, “Pastoral” links human emotion to the landscape in which it takes place. Caesura and repetition—“the turn/ the turn-signal,” “the river river”—interrupt smooth elaborations of syntax, enacting a mind in the process of working through memory, checking itself, revising. The poem is full of attentive tenderness, emphasized—isn’t rhyme a kind of wedding?—by off-rhymes in critical places—queue, coo, and you; cause, pause, and applause, for example.
Forrest Gander on "Pastoral" |
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"What the Bolinas Poets Built"
"In an afterword to the new edition of On the Mesa, the scholar Lytle Shaw writes that Bolinas was the 'only instance I could think of where a town was essentially governed by poets.' Shaw’s claim is almost too mild: on the evidence of this anthology, the town was governed at least in part by the poetry itself.'
via THE NEW YORKER |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Corinna Vallianatos on Sylvia Plath's "Blackberrying"
"Nothing is ever nothing—description gives nothing shape. The seeing gains power, even as the one doing the seeing recedes. The bounty of what’s come before, the berries and their juices and the milkbottle the speaker uses to collect them, which brings to mind the body and domesticity, lifts at the end into the elemental, something seemingly less comforting but, to me, more so." |
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Poetry Daily stands with the Black community.
We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality.
We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter. |
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