What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In our new series, Drafts, we invite poets to explore the writing and rewriting of poems, and their many lives before (and even after) publication.   Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Carol Moldaw
In her and her and her I saw myself.
In carved sandstone, a voluptuary,
my neck coiled to face my back, my back
twisted to pinch and raise for inspection
a small patch of almost-out-of-reach skin.

One foot planted, the other on toe,
my toes on a narrow ledge high up
the temple’s façade. I’m unfazed
by gaze of mason, acolyte, or tourist.

And in her, also slightly coiled, rising
out of the bath under a painter’s gaze, I saw
myself stepping over the tub’s rim, sideways
into the easel like a towel. You call me
by the painter’s name: a Lautrec. A Degas.

Myself in veined marble, my towel now
draped like a veil. Or etched, in a notched
crosshatch illusion of fishnets. Hewn
in block, impaneled in canvas, versions
sketched, filmed, celluloid, digitized—.

Countless iterations find me poised
as if alone at the mirror examining eye,
lip, brow: brush and palette in hand.

The mirror goes back to grit, a sand
that can’t reflect but absorbs the noon sun
I peer up into, as into a museum’s directed
and calculated light, as into a church’s
perpetual dusk, cinema’s blackout velvet.
from the book GO FIGURE/ Four Way Books
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Cover of Carol Maldaw's new book, Go Figure
What Sparks Poetry: Carol Moldaw on Drafts

"In many ways, this draft marks the end of my blind groping and the beginning of the poem proper. Nothing I’d written up to that point had caught my poetic interest linguistically; my thoughts, preoccupations, and perceptions had been floating around without substance or anchor. In this draft though, images began to coalesce, and the lines develop a distinctive voice—the poem’s voice."
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Color illustration of liquid spilling from a tipping teacup, referring to the poem, Song on Porcelain, discussed in the essay
Czesław Miłosz on Captive Minds

"It’s unlikely that many American writers and academics will soon become servants of a right-wing bureaucracy. But, in a dispirited time, can we maintain our best values in publishing and academic life without self-justification and temporizing? And, just as important, can the very act of resistance enfeeble the imagination? Miłosz’s clarity about such questions is inspiring, all the more so because his situation in the Poland of 1947 was so extreme."

viaTHE NEW YORKER
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