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Poetry Month 2016: Su Tung-P’o
Reading the Poetry of Meng Chiao Night: reading Meng Chiao’s poems, Characters fine as cow’s hair. By the cold lamp, my eyes blur and swim. Good passages I rarely fine— Lone flowers poking up from the mud— But more hard words than the Odes or Li sao— Jumbled rocks clogging the clear stream, Making rapids too swift for poling. My first impression is of eating little fishes— What you get’s not worth the trouble; Or of boiling tiny mud crabs And ending up with some empty claws.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Vijay Seshadri
The Scholar Illusions she didn’t know she had were shattered when she saw in the text she was cleaning up— the corrupt recension of the now lost text— not the cypress of heaven or the morphology of a recurring type or the riverbank where a god dances but her own self’s circumstances, and not in the lover but the miserable sinner who, as the poem trembled to the death of its god, drew back in fear and so came to be noticed by the demon who so resembled her sworn enemy in her department, with his bleak chin and his…Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: David Giannini
[For those of you who may have wondered what happened to the April 18th post, the auto-post feature evidently conflicted with some kind of Wordpress update and failed to post. It appears below.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Janine Pommy Vega
Four Days Before Rumi Died for the Harvest Moon Collective, in memory of Fielding Dawson I could travel around the world sending you postcards: Nope. These people are not as free as you, either, but the law does not allow postcards. I could call you from across the country: I had a dream! You were in it! but there is no phone line to a bank of cells, just the telegram of a sixth sense set precisely in the present.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Nicky Beer
Marlene Dietrich Reads Rilke on the Lido, 1937 The beach is vulgar, the resort salted like dead fish. The book is not a prop. Strange to be called box office poison in such a poisonous time; she imagines the glass of a ticket booth fogged with a sinister green mist. The latest La Stampa is crumpled at her feet like a cheap towel, a crab dozing on Stalin’s mustache. Since the studios stopped calling, she’s noticed how the headlines crawl with new dread daily: Il Duce preening, Earhart missing, Guernica’s ruins smoking. How elegantly rubble photographs, she half-thinks.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Nicholas Samaras
Bless the Head of Gerald Stern A Maskil I call the Lord to bless his prophets, to remember their words and visions. I call the Lord to bless the head of Gerald Stern, to bless even the sparse and numbered hairs of his head, to keep him swinging into feisty age. Oh, bless Gerald Stern for all he gives. The Bible may have killed all its prophets, but not this one. You don’t touch this one. Lord, I call you to bless the head of Gerald Stern. Let him be.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Gerald Stern
Thinking About Shelley Arm over arm I swam out into the rain, across from the cedars and the rickety conveyor. I had the quarry all to myself again, even the path down to the muddy bank. Every poet in the world was dead but mt. Yeats was dead, Victor Hugo was dead, Cavity was dead—with every kick I shot a jet of water into the air—you could see me coming a mile away, my shoulders rolling the way my father’s did.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: David J. Rothman
An Apology for Poetry I apologize. I thought we were in a foreign country. I was inspired by the exotic landscape. The jagged green mountains that framed What I had believed to be Arcadia— That scene seemed to make all of our gestures Meaningful, precise, and accurate. It’s so much harder than I thought. I’m sorry. The music must have gone to my head. The guitar, from which each note must be strongest At the moment it begins, confused me, Filling my body with notions of love That were completely inappropriate. I guess I wasn’t paying attention.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Linda Pastan
The Poets They are farmers, really– hoeing and planting in strict rows ripe with manure, coaxing each nebulous seed to grow. Year after year of drought or rainstorm, locust or killing frost, they bundle their hay into stacks of inflammable gold, or litter the barn floors with empty husks. At the market they acknowledge each other gruffly and move on, noting who has the more bountiful harvest, whose bushel baskets are laden with beets and tomatoes, tumescent with fruit.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Olav H. Hauge
One Word One word —one stone in a cold river. One more stone— I need many stones to make it across. ~ I Have Three Poems I have three poems, he said. Who counts poems? Emily tossed hers into a trunk, I don’t believe she ever counted them. She just spread open a tea-packet That was the right thing to do. A good poem should smell of tea. Or of raw earth and freshly split firewood.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
