What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of 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.
Edward Salem
Behind eternity isn’t
more eternity. Nothing
lies in wait. Maybe you

think of it as a vacuum,
a void at the center of
the universe, a dot

that went all ways
at once, an asterisk,
footnote to everything.


Nothing is the Godhead
that gobbles the world
in one fell swoop,


but has no anus.

from the journal MERCURY FIRS 
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Cover of the issue of Mercury Firs in which Edward Salem's poem first appeared
What Sparks Poetry:
Ian U Lockaby on Edward Salem's "Fullness"


"In Edward Salem’s poem “Fullness,” thought is derailed, not from the first instant but nearly, and in each subsequent instant the poem expands and contracts simultaneously in a dissent against time and space, as it leads us to a divine, non-existent anal inner mountain, where there is nothing (and everything) to be seen (at once). Operating intertextually with a Godhead in its poetics of negation, the poem manages, paradoxically, to build possibility through its persistent negations. Each time a line of argument becomes discernable, it’s quickly and forcefully wrought back around its own tail, creating coils of energy in refusal."
 
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Black-and-white headshot of J. R. R. Tolkein
"Beyond Bilbo: JRR Tolkien's Long-Lost Poetry to be Published"

"He is one of the world’s most famous novelists, with more than 150m copies of his fantasy masterpieces sold across the globe, but JRR Tolkien always dreamed of finding recognition as a poet. Now, half a century after his death, 70 previously unpublished poems are to be made available in a landmark publication. The Collected Poems of JRR Tolkien will be published by HarperCollins next month, featuring more than 195 of his poems."

via THE GUARDIAN
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