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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Kevin Walzer, a poet, poetry publisher, husband, and father.
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Wed, 21 Jan 2009
Book of the Day: The Unpredictability of Light by Marguerite Guzman Bouvard
The poems of The Unpredictability of Light by Marguerite Guzman Bouvard are quiet and intimate. The character portraits and narratives in these poems evoke an entire world.
Consider this poem, "Ana":
Ana
You gaze at the bush outside the window
of your tiny apartment, telling me
it throbs with birds, that it is winged
and filled with secret doors.
You soar with those birds
as they twitter among the branches.
You fly beyond the time of secret gatherings
under Batista when your life hung
in the balance and when you fled
the country you loved for the second time.
You fly above the long year
of your brother’s dying, above your grown children’s
sudden storms. You are sloughing off the skin
of discord and of the insignificant.
You are pared down now
to the blue waters of Varadero, the papayas
glistening in your father’s garden,
the poems by Ruben Dario where nothing
can be destroyed. Weightless,
you are what you were meant to be,
wrapped in wonder, your eyes
brimming with the unseen.
As a portrait, this poem gathers up history both private and public, and the portrait's subject is made unforgettable by Bouvard's careful craft.
Book of the Day: Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form edited by Annie Finch and Susan Schultz
Multiformalisms is a challenging collection of essays that questions traditional categories of poetic form. The notion of "multiformalisms," outlined by Finch and Schultz, encompasses both a broader range of formal poetic structures than is usually implied by the term "formal," and also a broader range of cultural contexts for poetic formalism. If your idea of poetic form is "iambic pentameter" or "sestina," then Multiformalisms will be a stimulating read.