Poetry Daily

Sadness Isn’t The Only Muse

Derrick Austin

I can’t imagine myself reading bedtime stories to a toddler, and I’m older than my father was when he read those brightly colored books to me.

from the journal Blood Orange Review

Appreciation: "His poetry is often forgotten or overshadowed in the Joycean canon by the later achievements of the prose works. His first published book, however, was the 1907 collection of poems, Chamber Music." (The Irish Times)
#pdnews
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-poet-an-irishman-s-diary-on-james-joyce-1.4466603

Review: "UNDERWORLD LIT is a book-length poem with a more than passing resemblance to the campus novel, and it may well rank as one of the masterpieces."
(Hong Kong Review of Books)
#pdnews
https://hkrbooks.com/2020/12/01/underworld-lit/

Review: "Earlier in the pandemic, I took up the friendly and pleasurable challenge of reading in tandem two recently published translations of poems by the Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli..." (LA Review of Books)
#pdnews
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/second-acts-two-translations-of-giovanni-pascoli/

Column: "As you reread the poem, the more echoes and echoes of echoes become audible. The narrow sparseness of the structure seems mimetic, and the reader finds themselves climbing the stairs of the empty flat...."
(The Guardian)
#pdnews
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2021/jan/18/poem-of-the-week-old-flat-abandoned-by-rory-waterman

Report: "When Amanda Gorman, a 22-year-old poet from Los Angeles, took to the stage on Wednesday, it was immediately clear why the new president had chosen her as his inaugural poet."
(NPR)
#pdnews
https://www.npr.org/sections/inauguration-day-live-updates/2021/01/20/958743170/poet-amanda-gorman-reads-the-hill-we-climb

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: Margaret Noodin on “Faoiseamh a Gheobhadsa”

Catch Up on Recent Poems

January 25, 2021

Faoiseamh a Gheobhadsa/Niwii-aabiziwinge

Máirtín Ó Direáin (translated from the Irish into Ojibwe & English by Margaret Noodin)

I will find Solace A short while only Among relatives Without sorrow Without mind worry Without loneliness Without confusion In the west

January 24, 2021

[To the queer silence…]

Sarah J. Sloat

An erasure from Sarah J. Sloat's book of visual poetry, Hotel Almighty.

January 23, 2021

After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly

Jane Wong

Hunger eats through the air like ozone. You ask: what does it mean to be rootless? Roots are good to use as toothpicks. You: how can you wake in the middle of a life? We shut and open our eyes like the sun shining on tossed pennies in a forgotten well.

January 22, 2021

Fiddle (A Duo)

Cherene Sherrard

Mouth organ at midnight.
One woman supine, another
quadrilles—all blush crinoline
and caramelized curls—in a swamp:
what slithers and steams, moss.

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