What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In the first series, The Poems of Others, our editors pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don't even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me—the far-off, deeply-felt landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and un- suspected turns in the path, and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods— all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house—, and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,— you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening...
"Rilke’s unpublished missive to a distant beloved became an archetype for much of my sense of the poetic: an epistle (in)to the unknown fueled by a compassion that comprehends radical otherness as an aspect of the self exceeding the self."
Sarah Crossan discusses her latest novel-in-verse, Toffee, and Joe Dunthorne, best known as the novelist behind Submarine and The Adulterants, speaks about his funny and dark debut poetry collection, O Positive.
Vermont College of Fine Arts offers a traditional low-residency MFA in Writing program along with a residential MFA in Writing & Publishing program.
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