☀ What Sparks Poetry: Matthew Cooperman on "Late Music"

February 24, 2025

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In our series Reading Prose, poets write about how the experience of reading prose, fiction, non-fiction, criticism, and theory, has sparked the writing of poetry or affected how they read poetry. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.

Late Music

Matthew Cooperman

Feeling the lonesome sky on a long drive home, you make it so

First frost, and the Black-eyed Susans staring, apparently

"Existence precedes Essence," he said, we say

Soon you will feel a foreboding in the Winter you have conceived

pain in the belly, a weather map of the eastern seaboard, organ
music grinding the Messiah, a boy
building an igloo covered in powder

—the wind howls ominously, see?

Rain follows fire turns to snow of ash

White, what have we done to Civilization?

There is no snowman you have not rolled from memory

Naturally, you can't always be reasonable, Humanism is what humans do

Wash the blood from your hands

Walk to the distant farmhouse covered in crows

Spring, pack, make a pact, choose murder, lust, compassion, shame

There is no such thing as not choosing

from the book THE ATMOSPHERE IS NOT A PERFUME IT IS ODORLESS / Free Verse Editions

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

Forward

Color cover image of Matthew Cooperman's collection, the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless

What Sparks Poetry: Matthew Cooperman on Reading Prose

"How will we spend our days? How will we attend to our rapidly accelerating planet? One habit of response is to read bracing prose, and for me, it’s often “the consolations of philosophy,” to quote an excellent recent example by Alain de Botton. From the Affective Turn to the Queering of Nature, Object Oriented Ontology to Anthropocene Studies, there’s an incredible florescence of philosophical writing going on internationally, as if climate change has triggered all our cells to wake up."

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

A Conversation: Ana María Caballero and Denise Duhamel

"These collections are in intimate dialogue with one another: Caballero’s Mammal (Steel Toe Books, 2024) investigates the birth of children, exploring pregnancy and motherhood with poems that mirror its messy reality rather than our neat expectations. Duhamel’s Pink Lady (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025) investigates the death of a mother during the pandemic’s early days, chronicling the separation between mother and daughter during lockdown in a world suddenly transformed."

viaBOMB

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