This poem is an attempt to resist elitism and embrace humanity. I drafted this in a Sunday writing group where we would each share some words from whatever we were reading, then we would mute ourselves and write a poem mining the list. One of the words that Sunday was “paradise.” I thought about how the existence of paradise meant the existence of non-paradise, how that parallels our real power structures, and on which side of the fence I want to be.
Arielle Hebert on "The Inventors" |
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Celebrate National Poetry Month with Our Readers
“Loving something can save you . . .”
"That’s the surprise truth that bursts open in the middle of Bill Brown’s poem, 'With the Help of Birds.' But who would have guessed it would be birds that could teach us how to live, how to love? Who would know that birds could save us from the 'great mundane,' the lock of drudgery, the pall of days that spreads its shroud of tedium, of grief, of loneliness, of meaningless to-do lists?"
K. Martha Sprano Levitt |
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"Ishion Hutchinson on Les Murray’s Sensory, Mozartian Poems"
"The triumph of Murray is that he takes the classical music—meter and rhyme—out into the open, back into the environment, and exposes it to the tumult of sun. Not as a nature poet or a shaman-farmer—big machineries quake frequently in his poems, none greater than the scudding, luxuriant 'Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman'—but simply by being the leviathan within that word-hoard of “life-enhancing sprawl / that require[s] style.”"
viaLITHUB |
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