“Wife of himself/she taught him how to be in this world/as all women teach. The woman in you/will teach you, man king,/how to be.”
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Tag: arts
Quan Yin
Fierce Lyric in Karla Kelsey’s “Blood Feather”
“Blood Feather stages scenes of both unexpected victory and chronic defeat in the three featured lives, while allowing us to imagine an alternative history for these women, had they been listened to and given latitude to exercise their rightful prerogatives in the culture at large, rather than retreating into conventional expectations of femininity.”
Shifting Patterns and The Rose
“Ever human-centric/We self-aggrandized/Anthropomorphized/And now agonize.”
Ekphrasis and Eugene Datta’s “Water and Wave”
“Once the speaker’s psyche and voice are introduced via questions, the photo in a sense begins to dissolve, becoming secondary, important, vital in its own right, but not ultimately defining. Thus the fecund faithlessness of poetry.”
Paying For Pleasure
“The old man had paid dearly/he could still get lost in dreams”
Homelands
“The bright green of summer wheat/with the brown of the ducks that stalk the fair/dykes where the raft spiders search for things to eat.”
Villanelle on a Theme from Rimbaud and Other Poems
“He feels himself watched/as he counts accents./He knows the painter’s/watching for the precise moment/when his blue ink freezes.”
How To Write Lyric Poetry
“This lyre-derived heritage survives robustly in the lyrics of pop songs, guitars now taking the place of the lyre and the orality of the human voice singing taking precedence over all.”
Arteries & Veins
“In oncoming lights, my veins are dirty strings.”
After Emily Dickinson, “Circumference thou Bride of Awe”
“Every night/A lover be”
Midnight Sutra
“In yellow night, the day refuses to give ground/and I prepare to wait out its siege. Soon you’ll/arrive, and together we’ll chant the Midnight/Sutra”
A Different Kind of Knowledge: Matthew Zapruder’s “I Love Hearing Your Dreams”
“The combination of dread and cheer these reveries bring about could accurately be called the optimist’s nightmare. The poet-speaker holds compassion as the stalk of a dandelion holds juice, hidden yet keeping the flower active and aloft through sheer tensile strength.”
Salamander
“Held in palm,/a bloom of peony to/inspect.”
You Hesitate, You Die
“A metaphysical compass, a refrain, an unyielding ethos in which to believe,/no longer reserved for near misses with the vehicular minions of the MTA,/I have come to regard existence as nothing more/than this pull between hesitation and action”
Poems Without a Passport: Solmaz Sharif’s “Customs”
“Sharif’s style throughout Customs is neither bland nor baroque. It has the directness of what one overhears while waiting in line to cross on foot an international border or passing through immigration at an airport. It is a stylization of how people talk in such circumstances.”
