This poem is from "El interior de la ballena / The belly of the whale," our bilingual edition of Claudia Prado’s Patagonian novel-in-verse (Texas Tech University Press, 2024). The book is based on Prado’s agrarian family legacy, stories of hard-won generations. In it Prado creates a poetics of her place, a music of aridity and wide horizon. To honor her achievement, I composed the English in silence more than sound. I learned that nature’s silence, like that of love, can heal us—if we answer its call to let go.
Rebecca Gayle Howell on "1908 | Return" |
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"Danez Smith Sculpts Pessimism Into Hope"
"I love the visual fields that poetry holds so well, but nothing can start without the word for me. However, language sometimes does not satisfy, and when that’s the case I can ask 'Is this just not the write words or is there something about the shape that I can manipulate to better get to the poem’s intended heart?' I try not to play for the sake of making a poem 'different' for variety, but to really listen to the poem and ask how it wants to be embodied outside the confines of my mind. "
via ELECTRIC LITERATURE |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Robert Pinsky on David Ferry's "Johnson on Pope"
"Tell all the truth but tell it slant—. The moment I begin saying to myself Emily Dickinson’s first line, my tongue flicks rapidly to the roof of my mouth for the first sound in the first word “Tell.” The same exact little movement happens at the end of the line’s last word, “slant.” In this pre-industrial, bodily way the reader becomes the poet’s instrument. In a way, it is as though they were one. But in another way, the bodily nature of the line enacts the double solitude: the reader’s body absolutely itself, utterly separate from the equally solitary poet who made the line: solitaria. Ferry’s poem is about the empathic loneliness Johnson’s prose suggests but cannot embody." |
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