What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Building Community, we spotlight connections between our work on the page and our work in the community, and explore what community makes possible for poetry itself. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the interview.
Emotional Rescue
I was having a moment,
so I went home
and covered myself in princess stickers.
You received my telepathic distress call
and turned the lights off when you walked in the apartment.
You let me talk about our level of doomsday preparedness
as breakfast for dinner cooked itself.
We ate, did dishes, entered the temple
the villagers told us glowed purple nightly,
frightening the livestock.
We threw down the terrible altar.
We beat back hooded monks and acolytes.
In an offering pool we swam
in darkness. We saw each other
with our hands.
from the book DEEPER THE TROPICS / Fonograf Editions
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Color cover image of Matt Broaddus' book, Deeper the Tropics
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"A major interest of mine, in terms of bringing in historical reference, is just trying to acknowledge that where I am is not the be-all-end-all and won’t be the be-all-end-all.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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Color cover image of Jaia Hamid Bashir's book, Desires/Halves
"On Jaia Hamid Bashir’s Desire/Halves"

"In Desire/Halves, the alluring and unruly ways of memory imbue the speaker with the logic of one who has been torn and cleaved from somewhere wandering a plane of recognition, of Aristophanes’s halved lover recognizing a matching half in vivid images of fruit, the eyes of impossible animals, and the arrivals of moons. Desire is a self made vast, a 'godstorm.'"

via POETRY NORTHWEST
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