joanbpoet

[joanbpoet]

#quotation #creativity #harry and the hendersons #john lithgow #art #martha beck #the joy diet #life #desire #blog

[joanbpoet]

“Talk” by Noah Warren

published in The Nation

Love of the world is so clearly come and go,

the way we talk sounds beautiful and sad.

You have to try these three words before you can

say the harder thing.

The air at evening crumbles into rose flakes.

The wind like a child’s breath.

This is cement. It's’ almost hard now, but when it’s new, it’s soft.

If we step in it then it’ll be there forever.

To describe is to praise, I’ve always felt that.

Two crows fly up and disappear into the depths of the redwood.

Talking with Sarah in bed I touch her hair.

How often do we use the word “safe” each day? Thanks,

a walk sounds nice. When I write this

winter I trace lines of motion I conclude

I’ve lived. My mentor tell me I am

more than a series of inclinations,

twilight knotted with dislikes. 

#noah warren #poem #poetry #the nation #@NationPoetry #@nowawarren #twilight #safe

[joanbpoet]

Untitled #10, 2002

Victoria Chang

What happens if these aren't pastoral or war poems? When I can feelthe light I carry on my back but can't see it or use it?When sadness and language cast the same shadow. These six strips arethe shadows of our blood, proving that every woman's life canbe broken into and displayed. On some nights, if I zoom in to thepainting, they become three sets of lips. If I hold my phone nearmy mouth, I can feel three people breathing on my face. I made aneffort to unlove everyone, but all I received were these lips, slightlyopen. Today my eighty-year-old neighbor told me, Everythinghurts...you'll see. I wanted to tell him that I already see. After adeath, the idea of a journey disappears. After two deaths, the journeydoubles. Maybe our bodies never had a vanishing point,so there will always be hunger. Even a woman's life is trying tobecome more than the woman it represents.

First published in The Kenyon Review, 45:3 (Summer ’23), pp. 188 Copyright © 2023 by Victoria Chang. All rights reserved. Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

#poem #poetry #victoria chang #the Kenyon review

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#poetry #blog #rachel zucker #wave books #soundmachine

[joanbpoet]

#art #life #inspiration #grief #dreams #hidden room #door

[joanbpoet]

#poem #poetry #donika kelly #academy of american poets

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#book review #ACRE Books #University of Chicago Press #Jessica E. Johnson #poetry #book #prose poetry #Joan Biddle

[joanbpoet]

#blog #poetry #tv #the marvelous mrs. maisel #amy sherman palladino #amazon prime #rachel brosnahan #luke kirby #tony shalhoub

[joanbpoet]

#poem #poetry #blog #Elisa Gabbert #normal distance #blogging #ludwig wittgenstein #philosphy #essays

[joanbpoet]

If all possible worlds don't exist, we might actually live in a / very unlikely world. It might not get any more unlikely than this.

Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance 

#elisa gabbert #normal distance #soft skull #poetry #quote #quotation

[joanbpoet]

#blog #poetry #writing #inspiration #grief #music

[joanbpoet]

#blog #music #michael jackson #memoir #dance

[joanbpoet]

The sea was red and the sky was grey, I wonder how tomorrow could ever follow today...

Led Zeppelin, “Going to California” 

#lyrics #poetry #led zeppelin #music #quotes

[joanbpoet]

“To My Greek” by James Merrill

Dear nut Uncrackable by nuance or debate, Eat with your fingers, wear your bloomers to bed,

Under my skin stay nude. Let past and future

Perish upon our lips, ocean inherit Those paper millions. Let there be no word For justice, grief, convention; you be convention—

Goods, bads, kaló-kakó, cockatoo-raucous

Coastline of white printless coves Already strewn with offbeat echolalia. Forbidden   Salt   Kiss   Wardrobe   Foot   Cloud   Peach —Name, it, my chin drips sugar. Radiant dumbbell, each

Noon’s menus and smalltalk leave you

Likelier, each sunset yawned away, Hair in eyes, head bent above the strummed Lexicon, gets by heart about to fail This or that novel mode of being together

Without conjunctions. Still

I fear for us. Nights fall We toss through blindly, drenched in her appraising Glare, the sibyl I turn to

When all else fails me, when you do.

The mother tongue! Her least slip a mirror triptych glosses, Her automation and my mind are one. Ancient in fishscale silver-blue,

What can she make of you? Her cocktail sweats With reason: speech will rise from it, Quite beyond your comprehension rise Like blood to a slapped face, stingingly apt

If unrepeatable, tones one forgets

Even as one is changed for life by them, Veins branching a cold coral, Common sense veering into common scenes, Tears, incoherent artifice,

Altar upset, cut glass and opaline

Schools ricocheting through the loud cave Where lie my Latin’s rusted treasure, The bones, picked clean, of my Italian,

Where some blue morning also she may damn

Well find her windpipe slit with that same rainbow Edge a mere weekend with you gives To books, to living (anything to forego That final drunken prophecy whereby,

Lacking her blessing, you my siren grow

Stout, serviceable, gray, A fishwife shawled in fourth-hand idiom Spouting my views to earth and heaven)—Oh,

Having chosen the way of little knowledge.

Trusted each to use the other Kindly except in moments of gross need, Come put the verb-wheel down And kiss my mouth despite the foot in it.

Let schoolboys brave her shallows. Sheer

Lilting azure float them well above Those depths the surfacer Lives, when he does, alone to sound and sound.

The barest word be what I say in you.

#poem #poetry #james merrill #to my greek #hudson review

[joanbpoet]

"She has no words for how it feels to lose her mother, and yet, here are all the careful words in this book." I reflect on Victoria Chang's obituary poem for "Affection."

#poem #poetry #blog #reflection #victoria chang #OBIT #Copper Canyon Press #joan biddle

[joanbpoet]

#blog #literature #life after god #douglas coupland #joan biddle #poetry #fiction #essay #creative nonfiction #meditation #reflection

[joanbpoet]

"Ask, now that body shines / no longer, by what light you learn these lines." Here I reflect on James Merrill's poem "b o d y."

#poetry #blog #james merrill #b o d y #Knopf #a scattering of salts #joan biddle