What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Language as Form, poets write about poetic language as patterned language—how words as sound, voice, sentence, and song become elements of form. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Still, I keep myself, I take
to bed. One lung is red. Cut red
flowers hung in pink water.

My other lung is out of  line.
From one lung, I tell the truth.
From the other lung, I lie.
Cut pink flowers hung in red water.

Like a pain, the truth is mine.
The lie is that today I want to die.
Cut red water hung in pink flowers.

The rest of it is stillness, rest.
A soft cough into a hard pan.
A hard cough into a soft plane.
Cut pink water hung in red flowers.
from the book PUBLIC ABSTRACT / The American Poetry Review
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What Sparks Poetry:
Jane Huffman on Language as Form

"In 'The Rest,' I use the repeating language pattern to demonstrate a breakdown from idea into sound, from the recognizable image—a vase of flowers—into something stranger, something that attends to the 'prehistorical, preconceptual and prelinguistic' utterance 'prior to its translation into language-mediated conceptual sense.'"
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Terrance Hayes on James Tate

In his foreword to James Tate's Hell, I Love Everybody, Terrance Hayes writes, "When a reader contemplates leaving the book party, the reader who notices must say, 'I feel as if I were the residue of a stranger's life, that I should pursue you.' The Jim Tate poem normalizes the bizarre, the dream-songy, the mythic, the absurd, the quotidian, the diurnal, surreal, and occasionally nightmarish feeling of life."

via THE ADROIT JOURNAL
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