What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our third series, The Poems of Others II, twenty-four poets pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay. 
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
        With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle tame and meek
        That now are wild and do not remember
        That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with continual change.

Thank'd be fortune, it hath been otherwise
        Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
        When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
        And she caught me in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
        But all is turned from my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
        And I have leave to go of her goodness,
        And she also to use new-fangleness.
But since that I so kindely am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
from the book THE COMPLETE POEMS/ Penguin Random House LLC
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Cover of the Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt
What Sparks Poetry:
James Longenbach on Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me”


"I’ve never much cared if a poem is metered or not, rhymed or not, and I found the twentieth century’s transformation of these formal tools into weapons by and large distracting. All poems live or die in the concerted arrangement of syllables into patterns that are alternatively broken or reinforced. Wyatt taught me that." 
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Cover of the new translation on Ito Hiromi's Killing Kanoko and Wild Grass on the Riverbank
“One Good Thing About Being Alive is the View”

In a roundup of the best recent poetry collections, Joanne Less introduces three debut collections, by Will Harris (Rendang),  Mina Gorji (Art of Escape) and  Crispin Best (Hello).  She also highlights the new translation of leading Japanese poet Itō Hiromi's Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank, noting that, 'Itō entwines the sensual and the grotesque in this radical, relentless collection."

viaTHE GUARDIAN
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