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Poetry Month 2016: Eavan Boland
What Language Did The evening was the same as any other. I came out and stood on the step. The suburb was closed in the weather of an early spring and the shallow tip of washed-out yellows of narcissi resisted dusk. And crocuses and snowdrops. I stood there and felt the melancholy of growing older in such a season, when all I could be certain of was simply in this time of fragrance and refrain, whatever else might flower before the fruit, and be renewed, I would not. Not again. A car splashed by in the twilight.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Constantine Cavafy
The First Step The young poet Evmenis complained one day to Theocritos: “I have been writing for two years now and I have composed just one idyll. It’s my only completed work. I see, sadly, that the ladder of Poetry is tall, extremely tall; and from this first step I now stand on I will never climb any higher.” Theocritos replied: “Words like that are improper, blasphemous. Just to be on the first step should make you happy and proud. To have come this far is no small achievement: what you have done is a glorious thing.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: John Brandi
No Ship Will Ever Take You Away From Yourself —Cavafy Sunrise through glazed reeds. Abyss washed clean by fathoms of mist. Halfway around the world I wake under a cover too thin, finish a poem, fill the pen. Teapot nods its lid. High crags shine in warm breeze. Who is this man working through words to find stance in the journey? A foot taps up and down under the table. A sudden gust turns the page. Empty, it holds spring sunlight.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Ovid
Tristia, Book IV, 10 Who was this I you read, this trifler in tender passions? You want to know, posterity? Then attend:— Sulmo is my homeland, where ice-cold mountain torrents make lush our pastures, and Rome is ninety miles off. Here I was born, in the year both consuls perished at Antony’s hands; heir (for what that’s worth) to an ancient family, no brand-new knight promoted just yesterday for his wealth.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Hayden Carruth
Ovid, Old Buddy, I Would Discourse with You a While upon mutability—if it were possible. But you don’t know me. Already you cannot conceive my making the second line of a poem so much longer than the first.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Sam Hamill
from Lives of a Poet: Four Letters to Hayden Carruth 2. Pilate asks, “What is love?” For which I substituted friendship, which is love unburdened by erotic passion, but informed by love’s kindliness, if not by the inevitable necessities of dialectic argument. And so I begin again— “My dear friend,” I say, meaning I have stood breathless before the severe beauty and anguish and love and delight in your poems, stood breathlessly still as I listened to the turn of a line or phrase or flinched in recognition of a painful truth revealed.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Jared Carter
For Starr Atkinson, Who Designed Books Oldest of words, of sounds: star. Everything of that name perishes. The sun will reclaim each planet, the galaxy collapse, light itself siphon down into a last darkness. From you I learned how images balance in the white space of each page, how pages unfold like leaves, how light and dark interpenetrate, how what we do will not be noticed.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Louis Simpson
The Unwritten Poem You will never write the poem about Italy. What Socrates said about love is true of poetry—where is it? Not in beautiful faces and distant scenery but the one who writes and loves. In your life here, on this street where the houses from the outside are all alike, and so are the people. Inside, the furniture is dreadful – flock on the walls, and huge color television. To love and write unrequited is the poet’s fate. Here you’ll need all your ardor and ingenuity.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Ce Rosenow
On Reading Sappho’s Lyrics Sunday morning I trace each line of verse with my index finger, find myself stopping to study the crescent nail on its tip. In this small bit lies the DNA of my birth parents, the untold stories of ancestry, that if decoded, would allow narratives to emerge, unravel, collide, calling my years of authorship into question.Read More