I wanted to explore melodic rhythm in the pantoum. I broke the traditional quatrain into couplets, and then I floated a caesura inside each line and shifted the location of that caesura so that the silence created tension and changed the rhythm. I hope the repetitions and juxtapositions have a small gamelan-like effect.
Arthur Sze on "Papyrus Pantoum" |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Readers Write Back
"For the past three years, I have drifted in the riptide of “retirement,” a paltry word for the end of more than four decades of employment. I chose to study poetry as one of my life rafts – and Poetry Daily emails have served as a beloved life preserver each morning. Poetry keeps me afloat. From your archive I’ve chosen [Hope is a strange invention—] by Emily Dickinson, which was posted early in the pandemic on May 13, 2020. (The anniversary of Dickinson’s death is May 15.) Many of us have heard about hope being “the thing with feathers” but “strange invention” seems even closer to the bone, for our Covid era and so much more. In gratitude to poets everywhere – Here’s hoping that we never give up on hope – and let “its unique momentum Embellish all we own—”"
Sharon Dynak |
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"On the Opaque Origins and Tumultuous Ancient History of Homer’s Odyssey"
"Odysseus’s fraught interactions with immortals such as the nymph Kalypso, whose offer of eternal life and youth he rejects in favor of returning to his aging wife, force us, like the hero, to grapple with the meaning of mortality and the value of human love, even as his relationships with his wife, his bedmates, his son, and his father offer insights into the relations between men and women, parents and children."
viaLITERARY HUB |
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