Some of the Questions to Consider
Kim Addonizio
Is it better to offer your heart to the wolf
or wait for the wolf to tear it out of you?
It's hard to know which is worse,
the nightmare of approaching tornadoes
or waking from the dream your parents were alive in.
Enter the ominous music announcing the shark.
It is best to disappear into one's work.
Best to be ceaselessly drunk, Baudelaire suggested,
mentioning other things besides wine but most people
ignored that part, because who wants to be drunk on virtue?
Misreadings are best. Misunderstandings are also best
but to be misunderstood is not the goal.
I don't need drugs, I am drugs, Dali famously said,
and drew his wife's face exploding into spheres.
What do all these wildflowers mean? Just look,
said a famous American painter who, drunk, drove his convertible
off the road into the trees and flew headfirst into an oak.
We're all afloat in the same solution.
Would you like to trade some molecules with me?
Better to sketch a few atoms than fire neutrons at them
to create a chain reaction. The adult human body contains
7 octillion atoms and one picnic table. Is it time to go?
Not yet, not yet. Let's meet for an aperitivo.
Let's build a pineapple from all this fresh snow.
from the journal ALASKA QUARTERLY REVIEW 
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This poem emerged from lists of questions, after trying to write a poem about Florida and journaling about where I was and reading about atoms scattering after death and after writing a different poem. I often go back over notes to see if anything leaps out, then try to continue that mood with new lines. Mortality, creation, and imagination were all on my mind.
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Handwritten copy of Robert Frost's newly discovered poem, Nothing New
A Newly Discovered Poem by Robert Frost

"It was originally inscribed inside a copy of Frost’s second collection, North of Boston, that was found in a retired educator’s home library by a family friend, a book dealer, following the educator’s death. It’s a good poem, short and aphoristic, from a period when Frost, writing at the height of his powers, had a special affection for poems of this kind: brief, rueful, tight, focused." 

via THE NEW YORKER
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What Sparks Poetry: Farid Matuk on Language as Form

"I wanted this work to be accountable, to not settle for easy truisms about ambiguity or a lack of closure being liberatory or even interesting. I wanted, more than I had before, to risk being right or wrong or foolish or earnest or stylized. I don't know who to face, but in wanting to be accountable the poems call—a bit desperately, really—to readers I can't yet see. My ambition was to create across each poem and again across the book a complex of feelings, sometimes contradictory feelings, that would get at what's irreconcilable about the real."
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