These two poems are excerpted from a book-length poem, "The Maybe-Bird." The Maybe-Bird guides these poems in the way that dreams do—when we wake into language, the dream is barely there. We feel only the disturbance of its wings. We can choose a translation, to fit it into what makes “sense”, or we can follow the poem, its witchery, the sense of some imperceptible ascent.
Jennifer Elise Foerster on "Tuccēnen" |
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"Gerald Stern on the Accidental Beginnings of Poems"
"All poems start by accident, and every poem worth its salt was unpredicted and, as often as not, has its genesis at a low point in the poet’s journey—which turns out to be a good metaphor: Once, I was on a bus going south on Second Avenue in New York, an especially low point....I had been given a gift—the material for a long poem in the very middle of a busy neighborhood on an as-of-yet untransformed, unredeemed corner."
via LITHUB |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Robert Pinsky on the Favorite Poem Project
"I think of Emiko Emori’s video of a Cambodian-American high school student reading 'Minstrel Man' by Langston Hughes, David Roderick’s video of a bomber pilot who served in Vietnam reading Yusef Komunyakaa’s 'Facing It' at the Vietnam Memorial, Natatcha Estébanez’s videos of a U.S. Marine reading 'Politics' by William Butler Yeats, and of a construction worker reading from Walt Whitman’s 'Song of Myself.'" |
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