Archive for August, 2023
Untitled poem from ‘Starlings’ By Lisa Robertson Laura are you related to nettle and fig are you a two-sexed salve of code-riffling incident are you ready to speak into time deeply are you ingeniously fluorescent enamoured of the poverty of tiny tiny Europes shall you quit so many stupid apartments filled with stupid fate evade timeliness next a refrain unclasps how it was to be young and carrying our delicate grammars in cities and airports Laura let’s be Starlings Anne Boyer is a poet and an essayist. Her memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for general nonfiction. Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet who lives in France. Her recent books are the poetry collection “Boat” and the novel “The Baudelaire Fractal,” both from Coach House Books. A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 27, 2023, Page 10 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Poem. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Short Talk on Pain Anne Carson 1950 – Lawns and fields and hills and wide old velvet sleeves, green things. They stretch, fold, roll away, unfurl and calm the eye. Look lush in paintings. Battles are fought on greens. Or you could spread a meal and sup. How secretly they lie, floors of distant forests. Next comes the grave, in many a poem about green. But this is not a poem. This is a billboard for frozen green peas. Frozen green peas are good for pain. Copyright © 2023 by Anne Carson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 25, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. Source: Short Talk on Pain by Anne Carson - Poems | Academy of American Poets
Syrinx Spring
by Jennifer Scappettone
A fragment broken off a canary mystery play
At the end of Rome the emperor
and his followers tweeted at one another
until they violated the Tweeter rules.
They burned the forests for the wolves
so all that were left were the cathedral roofs
and then they burned those too.
The ceiling of rotating heaven
cranked by the dehumanized persons was buried
& fourteen centuries later praised by painters who fell
through a cleft in the soil,
who dreamt the frescoed raptors thereupon fantasy
whereas in truth they were just extinct.
* * *
Of this entire disenfranchisement,
the incandescent streets:
corseted throats heave
back names from the slurry.
Glowing yellow in a cage
full of oxygen: chants unheeded
unheeded
crimes with impunity.
* * *
What have we to say now that the reoxygenated Anti-
gen can no longer tweet?
Pentagon rebate.
Knock knock.
Who’s there to dub the silent spring?
A New Yorker columnist. A self-exploiting Insta-
brand. A bellows of poets in Milwaukee. Haunted
Dumpty.
Batter the wind against the fenced-in
national language organs to come
more variously up for air.
What breath’s left to shriek into the empty shaft?
This broken chorus of terror and nest, rape and repair.
Copyright © 2023 by Jennifer Scappettone. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 21, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
Source: Syrinx Spring by Jennifer Scappettone - Poems | Academy of American Poets
[The ship] is slowly giving up her sentient life. I cannot write about it. Jean Valentine Shackleton, diary Next to where their ship went down they pitched their linen tents. You, mountain-climbing, mountain-climbing, wearing your dead father's flight jacket— My scalp is alive, love touched it. My eyes are open water. Yours too. Sitting in the dark Baltimore bar drinking Coke with you with your inoperable cancer with your meds no tent no care what we look like what we say Later that night, in my room looking into the mirror, to tell the truth I was loved. I looked right through into nothing. “[The ship] is slowly giving up her sentient life. I cannot write about it.” from SHIRT IN HEAVEN: by Jean Valentine. Published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Jean Valentine. All rights reserved. Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
[St Murdoc’s chapel]
Lesley Harrison
•
a roundel
a sea door
a tree with a thought in it
•
the character of lichen
archaic, like aunts
clumped in off-white
antimacassar.
stonechat.
marks the air with empty brackets.
•
a yellowhammer
repeats, repeating
in dialects, in ancient forms of song
Source: [St Murdoc’s chapel] – Poetry Daily
“[St Murdoc’s chapel]” from KITCHEN MUSIC: by Lesley Harrison.
Published by Carcanet Press in May 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Lesley Harrison.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.