Cemitério de beijos

A canção desesperada

Pablo Neruda

From The Free Verse Project

Flying Over Language

I can’t write without knowing that each thing I define will be erased in time. There are no safe and secure places for language. The death of meaning is like the extinction of a species. But other meanings come forth to fill each ecological niche. The poet routinely wipes out entire taxonomic groups in order to make room for new forms of life. This culling is necessary; the poet who doesn’t do this is in peril. You must join with the fragility of sentience, recognize the elementary or undifferentiated consciousness where language originates. Writing poetry is like playing the piano with your hair. You don’t know exactly why it works, but somehow you’re able to make music. What I’m describing is intuition, the golden hunch behind all the explanations and theories, which allows you to take advantage of the fluidity of meaning. To intuit is to step outside language and view it from the air. What’s seen when you’re flying over language are the ruins of custom and interpretation, mighty edifeces meant to last milennia. But in fact, they’re made of straw, built on flowing water. No one who is seriously writing poetry can live in them for long.

Don Domanski

Oh, My Friends

“My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.” 
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Photo from the Free Verse Project

What Is Found There

Daughters in Poetry

From Eavan Boland:

There are far too few daughters in poetry. They turn up surprisingly rarely in nineteenth century poems, considering how they crowded into the available fictional equivalents. So it’s a relief to start the twentieth century with this big, ornate and controversial poem by William Butler Yeats. In a way it was overdue. He married late. He was well on the way to being sixty when he wrote this poem for his only daughter Ann.

What exactly is it he wants for her? What is it he wants to keep her away from? If a wealthy marriage and Irish politics are the first and second answers here, they still can’t shadow or trivialize the beautiful context of the piece. As a complex statement about patriarchy, the poem falters. But as an image of a father on a wild Atlantic night in the west of Ireland, trying to put words between his child and danger, it is memorable. And as an image-system of coastal thrushes, poisoned wells and the struggle against hatred it remains an absolutely compelling poem.

The absence of daughters in earlier poems raises an interesting question. Does a sudden, new and permitted subject matter–or gradually sudden as in this case–discover the poem, or the other way around? Probably the first. Certainly, the idea of daughters–the down-to-earth and vast register of human feeling compressed into the very word–has opened up a wonderful landscape of tone and intimacy and bold subversions in recent poetry, some of which I’ve tried to include here.

To start with, there’s “Morning Song” by Plath. No sonorous authority here. Not only does this first, joyful birth of her daughter Freida in 1960, find Plath in good heart and fine voice. But this is a place where she tries out the anti-narrative she would perfect in later poems like “Balloons.” The language is startling and exact. The baby’s mouth is as clean as a cat’s. The baby is at first a plump, ticking watch but then quickly lets out a bald cry which turns her into a statue, which makes emotion a museum and motherhood a spectatorship. And suddenly, skillfully, the poem has darkened.

Read the rest here

April Is Poetry Month

There will be at least a poem a day here.

Somewhere There Is A Poem

Gina Loring