TREE, as with most of the poems in quatrains in RUNAWAY, shifts speeds where it shifts temporal realms and physical locations. It stands under a full- fruited, heavy-leaved fig tree in one world and then under a blighted tree in a world where the climate has changed, fruit disappeared. It goes back and forth, struggling with what it is the imagination can do to help us measure the distance between a “then” imagined from “now," and a “now” remembered from “then." It lives in all three realms at once—future, past, and a shifting uneasy present. I imagined it as I stood under a fig tree spared by drought in my mother’s yard as she was dying—a tree miraculously full of fruit—and then stepped out a few yards, and suddenly saw all the other trees & their yellowed, leathery, dried-out crop. Her valley was in a terrible drought. But this one tree escaped. I picked a healthy fig. The end of the poem took me by surprise, as it unexpectedly brought me full circle to our original garden—with our biting into the fruit, our greedy, eager entrance into “history."Jorie Graham on "Tree" |
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 | | Virtual Event: The Cheuse Center and Poetry Daily will be hosting a monthly virtual event Friday evenings at 8:00 EST. We'll feature a moderated conversation between four poet translators, as featured on Poetry Daily. Our first event will be Friday, November 20th, featuring: Dan Beachy-Quick, Kazim Ali, Forrest Gander, and Jennifer Grotz. |
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"Juan Felipe Herrera: A Poet in Movement""Herrera now stands at the apex of his long career of stylistic experimentations, epic introspections, and constant innovations, thanks in great part to his deep sense of versatility and immediacy. He has not stood still, bringing into play elements of activism from the Chicano Movement as a performer, poet, novelist, writer of children’s books, teacher, cartoonist, photographer, chronicler, scriptwriter, and muralist."viaLOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS |
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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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What Sparks Poetry:
Jennifer Grotz on "Pantarheia" "What is it we’re actually influenced by when we read or translate from other languages? One answer lies in what the late critic Daniel Albright called panaesthetics, a sort of belief that certain universal principles might unite artists or the process of making, regardless of medium or language. But another answer might be that we go to the work of other languages or other art forms in order to escape an influence or given tendency that our own language and tradition may exert on our making." |
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