Poetry Daily

Postlude

Rita Dove

You prefer me invisible, no more than a crisp salute far away from your silks and firewood and woolens. Out of sight, I'm merely an annoyance, one slim, obstinate wrinkle in night's deepening trance.

from the journal The Paris Review

Obituary: "Locklin was a defining literary voice on the West Coast and beyond as a writer of poetry, fiction and essays, tracing an evolution from hard-drinking, bear-like bacchanalian to gray...elder statesman of letters."
(Los Angeles Times)
#pdnews
https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2021-03-03/gerald-locklin-long-beach-poet-dies

Roundup: Melissa Eddy discusses recent work by torrin a. greathouse, Natalie Shapero, Ruth Padel, Gregory Fraser, and Sylvie Baumgartel. (The New York Times)
#pdnews
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/books/review/new-this-week.html

Column: "The lyrical breadth and depth of Yona Harvey’s second collection of poems...is stunning; the book’s poetic conversation across time and space deliciously resists easy categorization or summary."
(Women's Voices for Change)
#pdnews
https://womensvoicesforchange.org/yona-harvey-you-dont-have-to-go-to-mars-for-love.htm

Review: "These days we forget that when Wordsworth died in 1850 it was Barrett, rather than Tennyson, who was most often mentioned as the next poet laureate."
(The Guardian)
#pdnews
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/24/two-way-mirror-by-fiona-sampson-review-a-fine-life-of-elizabeth-barrett-browning

Essay: "Poetry has a perfect integrity, just like a mathematical equation that has only one result. All of the elements lead to this result, & the inevitability of the equation—as if a human fate written in the stars—is clear."
(LA Review of Books)
#pdnews
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/star-vehicle-on-translating-poetry/

What Sparks Poetry

Translation

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.

In our current series, What Translation Sparks, we’ve asked a group of poet-translators to share a seminal experience in translation. How does the work of translating poetry feel essential to the writing of one’s own poetry? Our contributors reflect on inspiring moments as intricate as a grammatical quirk and as wide-ranging the history or politics of another place.

This week's issue: (Provisional) Sentences towards a New Manifesto of Translation Practice

Catch Up on Recent Poems

March 3, 2021

Winter

Ruth Stone

It is another raw winter. Stray cats are suffering. Starlings crowd the edges of chimneys. It is a drab misery that urges me to remember you. I think about the subjugation of women and horses; brutal exposure; weather that forces, that strips.

March 2, 2021

In Which I Search for My Brother’s Missing Body in Ohio

Khaty Xiong

Summer oaks warring on the hills A doe partaking of a resurrecting tulip Breakfast stray as my watery mind How late the cloud of my body born here A year spent looking for the way love claimed you The moon lording from the overhang & into open fire

March 1, 2021

Ayodhya

Valmiki (translated from the Sanskrit by Vivek Narayanan)

No one is poor in Ayodhya No one is unhappy in Ayodhya No one goes hungry in Ayodhya No one is robbed in Ayodhya No one is beaten in Ayodhya

February 28, 2021

The Jeansed Horse

Mark Leidner

The jeansed horse prances through heaven its big stupid meadow of empty beauty change shaking in its pockets like cosmic maracas.

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