Carlee Migliorisi
between the night & its shadow is the music
between the music & the night is the song
“Between the Night & Its Music” by A.B. Spellman invokes a deep consideration of the connections between people and music. Whenever I read this poem, I am reminded of all the stages and complexities that are withheld by every piece of music ever created. We are all connected to music. As Tower Records put in an abridged quoting of Nietzsche, ‘no music, no life.’ The poem embodies this statement throughout its reflection of this interwoven cycle, but specifically through my favorite line “between the voice & the music is the self.”
Click here to read A.B. Spellman’s “Between the Night and Its Music“
Mads Katz
1. So do you read literature?
2. Yeah.
3. Placated and ventilated
After reading “Metropolitan” by Patty Nash, there was new life in the scratch papers, refrigerator to-dos, lost notes — all scribbles had gained significance! The poem showed me that a convenient numbered list can hold everything, including unlimited sinks. All of the lists I make to fend off anxiety and discombobulation can be more than their utility. As a writer, this taught me that a mundane form should not be overlooked, and to shift my perspective to discover and create poetry in my routine writing. Rendering a day at the museum in this way with vivid imagery made me want to go wander through one myself, with a notebook at the ready.
Click here to read Patty Nash’s “Metropolitan”
Tara Hart
This too is the way I come back
to where I was young and my children were young
to where we planted all those summers
For me, poetry answers absence; like nothing else, it gives breath to the strangled feelings we have around the missing. Vona Groarke’s “The Way Memory Operates” teaches four new ways to write a grief poem. Use a dropped title, which opens the sticky door of beginning. Enter quietly in the third person for a couple of stanzas, gathering courage for the first “I”. Let the hardest part of absence — its repetition — rock us for comfort (“hard/and hard… night on night”). At the very end, let yourself make abstract music of the stuttering, fitful, nonlinear, and shattered nature of your grief.
Click here to read Vona Groarke’s “The Way Memory Operates”
Elizabeth Jacobson
Hundreds of fireflies
accompanied us in dream,
swarming in the birches
out the uncurtained windows.
I love how in Jane Miller’s poem “The Missing Apricot Tree” memory branches off into several tangents, and as a reader I am suspended in both a freedom that was youth (the speaker’s and mine) and a feeling of freedom that is from an older age. While time whirls us along, our minds change and memory loosens inside our lives: And a missing apricot tree/becomes as massive as the past. In some ways, it does not matter if what we remember actually happened: we evolve as do our images, and as imagination feeds into memory a new thing is born: This stick will have to be a tree.
Click here to read Jane Miller’s “The Missing Apricot Tree”
Brian Czyzyk
Too many deer make for a starving winter
When I teach writing about place, I try to tell my students that even their innocuous hometowns can be places of beauty and depth. I try to tell them that training your eye for detail will help you render the intricacies of a subject, that you’ll begin to recognize something has depths you had never considered. When I show my students “Vital Signs”—a poem that brings me back to the harsh winters of my hometown in Northern Michigan—I tell them, “Anything can hold a large amount of contradictions, even a small town, even a small poem.”
