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. 
I miss the elms, their "crowns of airy dreams,"
as Virgil calls them, their towering cathedral branching
spread into a ceiling above the lonely sidewalks of Ohio
where the first elm deaths were reported in America.
I miss in particular the perspective looking down
the distances of all those Elm-named streets disappearing
into dusk, the last sun turned the stained blue of church windows.
I miss standing there, letting the welcome dark make me invisible.
I miss the birds starting to sleep, their talking in their songs becoming
silent, then their silence. I even miss not standing there.
And I miss a life of nothing but such moments, as if they'd never
happened and all you had to go on was their memory
and the feeling in the memory forgotten but brought back
again and again because you miss someone you loved forever.
from the book AGAINST SUNSET/ W. W. Norton & Company
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Cover of Stanley Plumly's book, Against Sunset: Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Shara Lessley on Stanley Plumly's "Dutch Elm"

"As a poet, Plumly might be described as an elegist deeply attuned to the natural world. Formally varied, his work is both tender and apprehensive. Often drawing on memory, it attends to matters of isolation, strange beauty, resilience, and loss. 'Dutch Elm,' the opening poem in Plumly’s 2017 collection, Against Sunset, operates very much within this mode. It is in many ways a procession of grief, a sonnet haunted by longing."
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Abstract image of conceptual space

"Many programmers have links to poetry—Ada Lovelace, the acknowledged first programmer ever, was Lord Byron’s daughter—but it’s a challenge to fully bridge the gap. Sonnets occupy something of a sweet spot: they’re a rich art form (good for poets) with clear rules (good for machines). Ranjit Bhatnagar, an artist and programmer, appreciates both sides. In 2012, he invented Pentametron, an art project that mines the Twittersphere for tweets in iambic pentameter."

via THE NEW YORKER
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