Everything

I was 14 years old when I read this poem. I found it in an anthology called New Poets of 1965, which I kept until it fell apart and no longer have a copy of. I did not know Robert Kelly’s work then. I did not know he was part of the first wave of [...]

I was concerned about not knowing. Concerned about not being known. Yet I did little to be known outside of persevering with the work. The work being whatever I was doing at the time in my virtual creative space. Mind, body. Divine intervention. Spiritual revelation. The meaning of every day was living every day as [...]

Carolyn Kizer’s poetry pleases me in many of the same ways May Swenson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Alice Fulton please me: enormous intelligence and observation as a form of passion, as deep engagement with the thing made out of words. She is not interested in using the natural world to enter realms of spiritual transport. There [...]

Thin Kimono is a book of mistaken identities: a hallucinogenic wandering through a cocktail party the night before the invention of the internet. The party is populated with individuals you may or may not know. Your wife is a slightly altered version of herself. There are horses, but even they have become something else. Michael [...]

This entry is part of a series, Ur Poems» The first poem I ever loved was The Raven. Specifically, one line from the poem haunted me when I was young, and still does: “The silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.” Writers today might say that the line isn’t a very good one, now [...]

A song cycle of David Shapiro’s sonnets called Unwritten has been written by the great young composer Mohammed Fairouz and will be played at Carnegie at Recital Hall on March 21st. Word on the street is that David Shapiro himself may play the coda. Related Posts Poem of the Week: David Lehman Ur Poems: David [...]

Once I Walked Out Once I walked out and the world rushed to my side. The willows bent their willowy necks, tossed green hair hugely. The hawk cried by the well. The crows kept counting their kind. Once I walked out and the sheep bleated with sensitivity, touched black muzzles to the grass. I was [...]