Jim Moore
All modesty is false modesty
when it comes to poems,
or to the silence
in which poems begin
before they are words,
when they are still daisies
at the foot of a dead god
in an anonymous painting,
thirteenth century. Not to know how to live
is one thing, and nothing
to be ashamed of.
But not to know
how to sit in front of those daisies
with tears in my eyes:
what a waste that would be.
from the book PROGNOSIS / Graywolf Press
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The "anonymous painting" which caused this poem to be written is in the Accademia museum in Venice in the first room.  There was a bench under the painting and whenever I sat on it I felt protected somehow by the painting—both the figure of the dead god and the fragile glory of the daisies. The poem emerged from not understanding where those tears came from!

Jim Moore on "Not to Know How to Live"
A Short Conversation with Ada Limón 

"Poetry, for me, is a full-body experience. Whatever state my body is in when I write a poem, that’s part of the poem, the full sensory experience, the heat, the smells, the breath. The same is true when I hear or read a poem for the first time, it’s a bodily response, a corporeal event."

via MCSWEENEY'S
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Cover of Susan Thenon's book, Ova Completa
What Sparks Poetry:
Silvina López Medin on Susana Thénon's Ova Completa


"This book questions systems of faith and is also, among many other things, something of a search for ways 'to believe'....There must be way out, an exit, Thénon seems to be telling us, and that’s why she keeps asking, questioning, putting one word in front of the other, traversing the void in between, building out of words something that goes beyond words, a space with no hierarchies of language, of register, of form."
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