Summer
A young woman was pleasuring herself
on a pine tree that had fallen across
the narrow river where I went to fish,
straddling the trunk, her feet just breaking
the water, her body leaning forward
with hands pressed into the bark.
White shorts rode up her thighs and bunched
at her crotch as she settled into an uneven rhythm.

I thought of love, and you, my love.
But here, now, I see it—watching her ride the tree,
lifting one hand and then the other to wave
at the sky like a conductor, this quiet expression of pleasure,
this face of surprise. Strange angel—
no matter how much she rocked herself
she would not loosen the tree from its resting place,
she would not set forth down the river,
drifting somewhere new, somewhere east of here.
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"Poet Mary Jo Bang Reaches the End of Her 20-Year Journey Through Dante's Divine Comedy"

"I was reading that poem, and I was struck with two things. One was how antiquated the language was, even when the translation was quite contemporary. And the other thing I was struck by was that there were no two translations that were alike. And that was a lesson, I think, in the fact that there is no single way to carry over one language into another language."

via NPR
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What Sparks Poetry:
Matt Broaddus on Building Community


"A major interest of mine, in terms of bringing in historical reference, is just trying to acknowledge that where I am is not the be-all-end-all and won’t be the be-all-end-all. What I mean by that is that where I’m writing from is just a blip, you know, and my writing and my literary self on the page is in many ways an outgrowth of historical forces that are beyond my control. I think that one way I can feel like my art is engaging with these forces is to write about them and to move the past into the present."
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