Hi everyone! I hope you’re all enjoying your week. Two pieces of fun news for this afternoon— I’ll be reading tonight among friends at LangLab in South Bend at 7pm as a part of Lit Literary Collective‘s WRITE NIGHT with Ultreia, Inc. You can find more about it here; I hope you’ll join us!… Read More Reading at LangLab Tonight! & Poem Featured as Creative Writing Prompt
Help me turn my mind off. Help me be more than a song. The stress like a crow’s open flame. Help me to not give up on forgiveness. The work has become too wild here. Help me. Help me— (Days like today, poetry reminds me to live.) INSTRUCTIONS ON NOT GIVING UP … Read More Poem of the Day: Ada Limón
DARKENING, THEN BRIGHTENING The sky keeps lying to the farmhouse, lining up its heavy clouds above the blue table umbrella, then launching them over the river. And the day feels hopeless until it notices a few trees dropping delicately their white petals on the grass beside the birdhouse perched on its wooden post,… Read More Poem of the Day: Kim Addonizio
HE SAID I WROTE ABOUT DEATH and I didn’t mean to, this was not my intent. I meant to say how I loved the birds, how watching them lift off the branches, hearing their song helps me get through the gray morning. When I wrote about how they crash into the small dark… Read More Poem of the Day: Kim Dower
Hi everyone! I know it’s been a while again. But here I am: quiet little me, doing quiet not-so-little things. I’m in the process of starting a small feature series called The Curve with Write around the Bend, in preparation for their literary magazine launch next fall / winter, as well as an independent… Read More (I’m Back) Poem of the Day: Jack Gilbert
—To my fellow Benders, I threw on my grief. MY DUMB HEART is open wide and overflows with water. How I manage to stay alive is beyond me. I like to think that I am more than a wallflower, that others see something in me, that the love I feel swells out… Read More My Dumb Heart
—Hope is the thing with feathers. Here is a truth: I thrive on hope. But yet, here is another: if you fill a pillow with feathers, I cannot sleep— I wake in the middle of the night, heavy-chested and warm, throwing off the dark as if it were a spare blanket meant for… Read More Dear Emily—
David Dodd Lee has been there with me since the beginning—not since the beginning of my reading and loving poetry, but of my writing poetry and taking that progress seriously. Of taking poetry seriously, and the idea that there was something to be taken from poetry, to be understood, to be had. Like a… Read More “Black Light / Her Name in a Cup”: Scenes & Impressions: Reading David Dodd Lee’s Animalities
AT NORTH FARM Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you? Hardly anything grows here,… Read More Poem of the Day: John Ashbery
—after Philip Larkin TO BRING THE HORSE HOME Is all I’ve wanted past wanting since I was six and delirious with fever, an infinitive forged from a night when giant ladybugs with toothpick antennae patrolled my wicker nightstand. Yes, I’ve been with horses since, travelled illegally with them in trailers, known certain… Read More Poem of the Day: Julie Bruck
