john high @johnhighpoet - Tumblr Blog

A small man has been wreaking havoc at the Presse

SUBSCRIBE TO UDP! ONLY $15.50 A MONTH! he keeps saying

I say be quiet

this could #getugly

a new poem for monday:

Saying it in this way brought back the colored leaves of autumn all the maps & ghosted words & fleeting books & a girl first opening her mouth that dawn--a diary & suitcase & sentence & the morning of her birth beginning the water foghorn then sun a checkered shirt on a chair & a window looking out on a city a staircase to you a boy holding this wound in his eye & the meaning in her deafness still hearing a hand touch her ear the long steps back a mother a father & so many friends--a war & then peace & then another war--& all the born days & seeing how language went into so many different roads of body & cadence & into memory & into no death of words just floating into stars & into elephants & giraffes & water buffalo first seen in paintings on a museum wall & afterwards here in her diary after seeing them with her own eyes with the boy with you with us and all these wonderings & musings & imaginings into an alphabet of being that alone remembers her true name

milah libin described John High's poetry as reminiscent of the 1953 black-and-white Japanese film Ugestu Monogatari, directed by Kenji Mizoguchi and based on stories in Ueda Akinari's book of the same name.