☀ What Sparks Poetry: Carol Moldaw on "Go Figure"

Today's Headline: Czesław Miłosz on Captive Minds

February 3, 2025 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. Go Figure 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 READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM Share Tweet Forward 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." READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE 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 READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES donate View in browser You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. If you would like to unsubscribe please click here. © 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030 Design by the Binding Agency

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