There are states of heightened awareness in which the smallest stimulus can set you off—when nervous or frightened, when being tickled, during laughing fits. Farrah Field’s poems create worlds this…
Category: How Poems Work
GATE BY W.S. MERWIN Once I came back to the leaves just as they were falling into the rattling of magpies and the waving flights through treetops beyond the long…
HOW POEMS WORK KEN BABSTOCK Reluctance BY JOHN DEGEN from the air, the city cloaks itself in nature, patchy, black-green forests and empty roads beyond the runway fence, the blood-brown…
Dean Young’s Word Triplets We could say that there is a narrative to these three words: brick, blood-drop, red feather, which entails the passage from inert material to mortal flesh…
TWO POEMS BY MARGARET AVISON APRIL Dark like a handful of cool gray silk. Clocks strike the hour. Out in the clear-gleaming sky a robin’s song, silence unravelling. The trees…
Emmonsail’s Heath in Winter BY JOHN CLARE I love to see the old heath’s withered brake Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling, While the old heron from the…
Here is a clear fragment broken off from the perennial drama of girlhood, the vastness and vibration of summer air all around it. The waves sound their regular metre through…
Peering into Walter Benjamin’s Archive I don’t know you, WB. I don’t know you at all. I’m thinking of the way people seem to hear about you serendipitously, repeatedly. I’m…
HOW POEMS WORK KEN BABSTOCK Hay By Paul Muldoon This much I know. Just as I’m about to make that right turn off Province Line Road I meet…
Click on poem to advance. Monday — From The Weather, New Star Books (2001) And poetry can also be sculpture, or at least more like sculpture than it’s like conversation. Lisa…
The Provisions BY PETER CULLEY Between the storms of October And the storms of March the deep, wide trench Of this afternoon, one of a series making up This temporal…
PORTOBELLO by Glyn Maxwell When you were the one reading My palm, in the second hour of our one life, And I, sitting back for good and noticing white stuff…