And when a poet dies, deep in the night
a lone black bird wakes up in the thicket
and sings for all it’s worth
“
| — |
Miroslav Holub, from “Interferon” (translated by Dana Habova and David Young)
|
I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you ‘have something to say.’ I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The ‘unsayable’ thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.
Because I have heard poets say things
in front of roomful of strangers that made me
pulse, made me sweat, made me want to push
further, risk everything, be that beautiful.
“
| — |
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz from “For People Who Keep Asking Me Why I’m Still In Slam”
|
Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
“
| — |
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
|
poetry is terrorism in the domain of speech,
a bang in the cloister of language
“
| — |
“Poetry is” by Emilio Villa (trans. Dominic Siracusa)
|
Oh, body, be held now by whom you love.
Whole years will be spent, underneath these impossible stars,
when dirt’s the only animal who will sleep with you
& touch you with
its mouth.
“
| — |
Aracelis Girmay from “Kingdom Animalia”
|
Her unstartled gaze
Beads on him like a sniper’s sites, until
At the clean report of a cracking poplar branch,
She leaps away like luck, over rapid water,
And snowfall scrims the scene like a mist of tears,
Like a migraine, like sweat or blood streaming into your eyes.
“
| — |
A. E. Stallings, from “Epic Simile”
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