The orchid book says to stop watering
right before you think it’s enough, which doesn’t
help much
Frank Bidart tells us he came the closest to finding himself in his own poetry—and even then, not really.
In Christian Wiman’s new book, all easy answers about how spirituality informs the arts and vice versa are given fierce interrogation.
I see them lining up for slaughter,/ Judas at the head of the pack/ grunting his way to survival, while my/ pigs do not stand a chance, doomed creatures/ that they are, and it’s a good thing.
“Listen,” writes Mary Oliver, urging the reader to put aside questions and doubts as she describes terns wheeling over ocean waves, “maybe such devotion, in which one holds the world/ in the clasp of attention, isn’t the perfect prayer,/ but it must be close.” With Devotions, Oliver, who died on January 17 at age 83, […]
When the poet Mary Oliver died last week at the age of 83, my social media feeds blossomed into a field of tributes. I was a bit surprised, especially by the posts from some academic poets, because Mary Oliver’s work is simple (at first glance), accessible and bestselling, the antithesis of much poetry written by […]
I wanted to live my life split open, awake
Often Instagram poets want to tell the lesson in their writing rather than simply show the reader through sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes of their lives and stories.
Their names are legion
where they lay
tunneled beneath our borders.
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