☀ What Sparks Poetry: Farid Matuk on "The Moon in Cancer"

Today's Headline: "Shane McCrae Goes Back to Hell"

February 10, 2025 What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.In Language as Form, poets write about poetic language as patterned language—how words as sound, voice, sentence, and song become elements of form. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay. The Moon in Cancer Farid Matuk Run down, or risen Far enough to catch the moon’s reach For trees aglow with chlorine in their leaves and garlands From a long-gone national holiday That wants me to wake up awake, holding on To which expectation just ahead? If you have to ask, moon child, You’re already glowing Your silver face and our only friends in the sky, The doddering in their eyes Looking down to this pool deck, Barrel cactus, pink gravel Having been seen Comes with its own annotations I’ll go to sleep Asleep Unwelcomed but held By a word just behind from the book MOON MIRRORED INDIVISIBLE / University of Chicago Press READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM Share Tweet Forward What Sparks Poetry: Farid Matuk on Language as Form "I wanted this work to be accountable, to not settle for easy truisms about ambiguity or a lack of closure being liberatory or even interesting. I wanted, more than I had before, to risk being right or wrong or foolish or earnest or stylized. I don't know who to face, but in wanting to be accountable the poems call—a bit desperately, really—to readers I can't yet see. My ambition was to create across each poem and again across the book a complex of feelings, sometimes contradictory feelings, that would get at what's irreconcilable about the real." READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE "Shane McCrae Goes Back to Hell" "What is Hell, these days? New and Collected Hell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book-length poem by Shane McCrae, is an audacious effort to stage a tour of the underworld in an almost painfully post-millennial context and vernacular. McCrae’s Hell contains a human-resources 'bunker,' conducts intake interviews, shows the damned on screens that hang above gray cubicles sprawling endlessly in all directions, and communicates—pure evil—by fax machine only. The Devil must be reimagined for each age." viaTHE NEW YORKER READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES donate 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. © 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030 Design by the Binding Agency

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