Norma Cole
For Nicole Phungrasamee Fein

Hope is encountered, variously
remembered, granted the patterns
of heaven—countless tiny
stars, oxalis hearts,
forget-me-nots, test sheets

Distant mountain ridgelines
flatten to paper in daylight
with every purposeful motion
night vision of timeless time
approaching the pulse of suspension

Metabolic edge of experiment,
the radiant points, scales and
variations of beads and dots
breathe benevolent notes, their
particular legibility of trackless

Resistance, deep-rooted, time
becomes sight incarnate, embodied
control framing chaos, space beyond
clarity, branches of lavender, thistle
grinding binding wetting the colors

A meteor shower—constellation
as memory of perfection
from the bookFATE NEWS / Omnidawn
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Cover of Michael Schmidt's book, Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem

"Why do we consider, say, Milton’s Paradise Lost an epic, but Claudia Rankine’s book-length Citizen a lyric?....Milton’s poem looks and sounds like epic because it looks and sounds like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. In fact, all 'epic' really signifies is a family resemblance to Homer....As the poet and publisher Michael Schmidt shows in Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem, the rediscovery in 1872 of a long poem much older than Homer still leaves us reeling."

via THE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Tracy Zeman on Susan Howe's "The Nonconformist's Memorial"


Howe’s techniques create an altered world that a reader can step into and attempt to decipher. In the act of reading, we enter into the act of making. I loved the mystery in that process and the reader-work involved as we participate in the unraveling of established histories and the un-silencing that results....She both implicates the existing narrative and reconfigures it to create space for others."
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