Note on Passing

The taproot of the juvenile            birch sockets                 itself down
Leyla Çolpan
from the journal Magma Poetry

In our series Life in Public, we ask our writers to examine how poetry speaks to different aspects of public experience. What does it mean to say that a poet is, as C. D. Wright has put it, “one with others”? What is poetry’s place in the public sphere today, of all times? How has life in that sphere been expressed in poems? Is all published poetry public speech? What is a private poem? What is occasional poetry? What is political poetry?

Heather Green on Robert Pinsky's "Forgiveness"
Photo: Heather Green
Patrycja Humienik
Great Polish poets were born in cities that no longer belong to Poland. Now Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine. My people claim the imagined place.
Robert Pinsky
The airy dynamo of song Animates the shadows.
Donald Revell
Quick service; actual geese Going easy amidst children.
Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal
Tejida, Tejido, Tejide all genders woven.
Paul Gibbons
My brother is living again

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