Poetry Daily yellow logo
Charles Rafferty

Invention gives rise to invention. The blade demanded a handle; the ark unleashed a flood. It's always been like this. Luckily, under the right circumstances, a maple tree can become a violin. It allows us to utter Vivaldi, and someone is always waiting with a need we didn't know. You'd never guess there was a drought on this side of the dam. Listen, downriver, the sound of everyone you will never hear.

from the book A CLUSTER OF NOISY PLANETS / Boa Editions, Ltd.
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
I've been writing these prose poems relentlessly for about 10 years now. I used to have an aversion to the very idea of prose poems. I thought of them as mules—sterile hybrids. Now I think of them as the euglena—a cutthroat survivor with a foot in two kingdoms. 

Charles Rafferty on "The Problem with Invention"
Graphic indicating that Poetry Daily featured the work of 76 literary journals in the last year
Poetry Daily can publish work from a wide breadth of sources because of the generous time of our volunteers, the wonderful publishers who work with us, and the support of readers like you. To help us continue this work, we ask you to #SendPoetryDaily all year long by joining our monthly donors by April 15th.
Color headshot of Solmaz Sharif
"A Conversation with Solmaz Sharif"

"There is something about my commitment to poetry that’s born out of my awareness of a precarity and that there are times and ways that a life gets stripped down to all one can carry. There are times that one is not allowed to carry anything, and so one can’t even carry a novel in that moment; one would be lucky to have memorized some poems for the road."

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Cover of the February 2022 issue of Poetry magazine, in which the English translation of Irma Pineda's poem appears
What Sparks Poetry:
Irma Pineda (Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca) on Ecopoetry Now 

"In my mother-tongue, Didxazá (Zapotec), there are two words for referring to nature. One word is nagá, which makes reference to greenery, that which grows and reproduces, like plants, trees, flowers, maize: because there will be food, there will also be life. The other word, which we use more frequently, is guendanabani, which you translate as the blessing of life and which makes reference as much to the human life as to everything that surrounds us."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2022 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency