The word HERE, The heaviest word, It weighs more Than a grammar And vocabulary Full of elephants. Here is a place, An over-saturated Crossroads Of dead ends. The word HERE Puts The word JUNGLE in it. In it, the word ELEPHANT, Which breaks into it. The word is nearly Empty. Only a hole Inside a hole Inside Emptiness. A mouth without lips, Without a throat, Swallowing a word. The word HERE, A word where Once upon a time The word ELEPHANT Stretched out its trunk. Even though the hole Does not mark The place of disappearance. There was something. There isn't something anymore. Some once upon a time, The lightness with Which it breaks into A mouth that rattles One more time, But it isn't dying, You think, And this thought Breaks into The question About the disappearance of death. And the question breaks Into the objection NO, No into the argument About the arrival of death, Which has no Here of its own; It arrives with Its own unplaces. Enter, You absent guest, Leave, You unreadable trace, Still In search of A world For a place, Which it carries With itself.
"Half the poems in Aleš Šteger’s 'The Book of Bodies' are narrow, stanzaless poems that obsess over a single word. After announcing the word in the first line, the poems, having been launched on a journey suggested by the word, spill down the page. In this case, the heaviness of 'here' conjures both an elephant and absence, along with the arrival as well as the disappearance of death."
"The Smithsonian on Wednesday named Kevin Young, a poet, archivist, author and editor, as the new director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture....'The museum is such a beacon of thinking about the way that African-American culture is at the center of the American experience, and you can’t tell the story of America without the story of African-Americans,' he said."
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.
“For me, Virgil’s Aeneid is partly about continuity and repetition, a setting out over and over again. Likewise, David Ferry’s deep intertextual approach to writing—especially in Bewilderment, which includes his translations of Virgil, Catullus, and others, alongside his original poems—is also about continuity and iteration."
