What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Building Community, we spotlight connections between our work on the page and our work in the community, and explore what community makes possible for poetry itself. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the interview.
MADONNA OF THE CHAIR
I was afraid to die because i wanted to see you again
suck out the middle and repeat it
to start
Cruspy, and the ghost wins


Reproduction or praise, pretty less, lonely


Over and beyond that it was just of nothing at all
chrysanthemum branches that beat in the soup as they steam
you can move inside the bus
you're the garden of cups:

-Victory Evolves out of the Strategy Like a Moth

-By Things I Thought I Knew

-Steam, "light rising slowly as steam off their joined skin"

-Banners, then ordinary objects

To be touched when the banners, in perfect order
Are
On the temporizing ground or
Ground of intersecting highways

In that habit, you come first,
roll and wets, to be first the surface receiving the shadow

           none of the images gnostic
           or silent
           only full of judgement
people can recognize numbers and flags
           but not you!
from the book OF / The Elephants
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Color cover image of Kai Ihns' book, Of
What Sparks Poetry:
Kai Ihns on Building Community

"I think this dispersed but somehow coherent ‘I’ that exists in relation and as a problem of negotiating how one is oriented… I’m interested in this because I do feel like it’s a way poetry can process its world, in this case a world that requires complex negotiations of… realities, and the selves that can exist in them. You have to actively negotiate what you think the ground is, all the time… and that partially determines how you can be in relation."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
Review of Yuki Tanaka's Chronicle of Drifting

"In part, Tanaka accomplishes his surrealism through the use of the ambiguous simile, the metaphor in which tenor and vehicle are not completely yoked to one another, or at least not conventionally so. For Tanaka identifies a more essential quality in surrealism than mere eccentricity or strangeness, and that is in his focus on the oddity of language, poetry, and metaphor."

via POETRY FOUNDATION
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