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What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series of Ecopoetry Now, poets engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Pink light in ribs, asking again how to see.
                            Inquires as to the shape of wind.
                                                                                                        A good question
                                     highlights a rupture in the bathymetric map.
                                     I’ve listened hard in order to see. But what is seen
asks back.


Ribs gone gray, shifted north.
                                                Yes, he said to me, I’m pushing you away.
                                                What else is there to say?


I’m pushing you. Ribs crack. Fragments flung
                                                 against the dome. Why trust anyone, ever.


                    Because the flag in the valley
                                                           trust-traces wind.
                    Because rust
                                                           trust-traces corrugation.
                    Because an abacus of trust.
                                                           Because a life lived without trust
                    is a sad life to live.


                                                                                 So I lay my whole body flat
                                                                                                   in the icy river
                                                                                                                      until I can’t ask.


His body shook even when he was still. Which means he was never
still. I saw this as a sign of his enchanted, creative agitation. Later, it
was a sign of his shiftiness, his shadiness, his inability to sit even with
himself.

                                                         Ribs weft-grown, east-pressed, dissolve.


Small birds in the thicket unbutton the air with song.
from the book CHORUS / Omnidawn
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Cover image of Daniela Naomi Molnar's book, Choruss
What Sparks Poetry:
Daniela Naomi Molnar on "chorus 27 / Ojito Canyon / what consoles does wondering console"

"Poetry is borne of an elemental urge to connect with the deep time wildness of language. Like a poem, language is an ecosystem, made of the same stuff we’re made of, which is the same stuff the planet is made of. To speak a word, we move air through the fiery earth of our body, from the wet inside skin of lungs out through the watery trachea by the muscled earthwater of the tongue."
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Color headshot of poet Jane Hirshfield
"What a Poetic Mind Can Teach Us"

“'Poetry is the attempt to understand fully what is real, what is present, what is imaginable, what is feelable, and how can I loosen the grip of what I already know to find some new, changed relationship,' the poet Jane Hirshfield tells me. Through poetry, she says, 'I know something new and I have been changed.'”

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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