Shane McCrae
The air is colder than the light in the air

No fog         no smoke         but the light hangs on the air

Like fog         like smoke         I'm walking to the bakery

On Amsterdam         across from the cathedral


A middle-aged         man wearing a tweed cap and

A limp blue Members Only jacket passes me

And a black face mask with a white skull

Printed on it         but death is a professor everywhere


What have you learned he asks

What do you know

I turn the corner and the sidewalk's full of stu-

dents         everybody's parents sent them hoping


Back         elsewhere         the professor hangs his jacket on his chair

Sighs off his cap         tightens his mask
from the journal THE SEWANEE REVIEW
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The professor might not have been a professor—I don’t know what the man did for a living—but the contrast between his otherwise unremarkable appearance, very white, middle age, middle class casual, and his black death’s head mask seemed intended to teach somebody a lesson, maybe the students who had begun to step outside in the midst of the pandemic. And maybe the contrast wasn’t a contrast at all.

Shane McCrae on "The Professor"
A "monoprint" by William Blake
William Blake’s Monoprints

"Today, the monoprints are referred to as 'color-printed drawings' and 'large color prints,' which describe them only in part. They are designs printed in colors on paper, the conventional support of drawings and watercolors, but because the colors are opaque and have body, impressions look and feel like paintings.” 

via LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY
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Front cover of Joanna Klink's "The Nightfields"
What Sparks Poetry:
Maud Casey on Joanna Klink’s The Nightfields

"I read from The Nightfields most mornings for the vertiginous pleasure of scale, for the sense of intimacy and infinitude, in order to feel my insignificance in the world. Our relative insignificance, our like-it-or-not interconnectedness, Klink reminds us, is not such a bad thing to feel."
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