how can the fields continue as simple fields? @sunsounds - Tumblr Blog

hi here's a list of contemporary poetry that i have personally read & recommend. currently 173 titles, free PDF download to reference as you look for new books to read <3 enjoy!!

sweatermuppet

this is now at 266 titles (oct 20 2024)!

a list of contemporary poetry as read & personally recommended. currently at 266 titles as of oct 20th 2024 & will be updated (& dated) as i

sweatermuppet

updated this to 285 books! newest version includes 2 PDFs: one with plain text and one with direct links to the books, author sites, publishers, etc

havingapoemwithyou

The Way Things Have Been Going Lately by Ada Limón

KISSING THE PAVEMENT

A dangerous place by Chelsea B. DesAutels

#po

havingapoemwithyou

Passengers by Denis Johnson

Emily Skaja, from "I Liked Myself Better as an Exquisite Skeleton", pub. The Offing [ID'd]

#po

beguines

sunsounds

[text ID:

Unsent Letter to Jakob / By Jackson Holbert

When the pills entered my life / I knew what to do, but I didn’t / know what to do when they stayed. / When I was young the river was just / the river. And now it’s still / the fucking river. On a Saturday, / last winter, the light changed. Every color / backed away into the past and became / all at once, incoherent, immutable. / There is no explaining it. All I know is that / neither of us could stop it. And I’m not sure / if I’m interested in stopping it. Not anymore. / Though I think of you all the time / my memories still vanish like salt. God / knows what is doing the vanishing—/ my vague and ever-widening / insanity, the pills themselves. Someday soon / I will lose your hair, your ears, your hands, / the color of your first car, the first names / of your parents, and what’s left / after that? The fucked up trees? / The shitty sky? The long, cold river?

end ID]

#po

mushroomsink

red squirrel

sunsounds

[text id: it was the photo i took of the pool left behind the deer that died in my father's yard / darker than anything, snowmelt and mud // it was the skull i found in the dugout at the old baseball field, the one where now they're building a rec center, now / the boys were taking turns hitting it apart, teeth scatteing in the dust and sand // it was the path i would walk around the rust and yellow rise of machinery for rent, the bolds i would pluck from the dirt / the car that swerved the corner, sent me jumping for the ditch // the brakes failed on my bike when our hill was all torn grave / it was a scraped knee / it was a nuclear bomb end id]

#po

apoemaday

Porch Swing

by Joanna Klink

And to have come this way for nothing. To see my own skin’s shallow glow against the cool wood of the porch swing, holding out my arms. The breezes I created leaning back into me. I was swinging against the empty day, against the rain’s copper pitch, against summer. Someone banged out piano scales and I swung against them, the lack of silence. I was a guest in that house, feathering shapes in my head out of snow, a quiet above the porch-boards emptying through meadows and rose windows. Sun fell like mist from an opening in the clouds above farmlands, the hills sometimes lifting like waves. I was host to disappointments that were not mine. I watched a few weeds glint in the woods, felt dry lilacs browning, was unseen minister to stray things that could resist blurring. Wet leaves against water. Glass bowls by the high windows. But now these are dreams, they are plain tombs.

Why such painstaking care in sitting on a swing — breathing, as if I could float back into the precision of myself within the white hours of afternoon, hung from clean beams by chains made stiff by rust. Their cold metal links turning warm in my palms. Have I not changed at all, folding my legs beneath me, bracing for the next unspoken need, the blind demand to stand and shoulder what I had no hand in creating. The sound of windchimes beaten gold.

Love is quiet. Something that is not love barrels over it. But I know who I am, I know that I live, I can touch what I’ve lost. The farmhouse is gone, the people who lived there have gone. When I trail a wrist through the air the air feels branched and altered, the soft wrens shatterproof. We could have tried to see one another as separate.

#po

apoemaday

Crepuscule

by E.E. Cummings

i will wade out till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers I will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air Alive with closed eyes to dash against darkness in the sleeping curves of my body Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery with chasteness of sea-girls Will i complete the mystery of my flesh I will rise After a thousand years lipping flowers And set my teeth in the silver of the moon

#art

dreaminginthedeepsouth

"This is going to drive me into my own heart"

despairtwins

[ A poem often asks us to dwell there, and it's unbearable, especially if you have no practice, if you don't read or if you don't go off by yourself and sit alone for a while. Even those of us who write, we're often rushing around. So this dwelling, not fully comprehending something instantly, is very difficult. Anything that pushes us into the depths of our being is very hard to bear. I find it hard to bear. Sometimes I open a book that's so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can't stand it. It's like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I'm saying, All right, and I just surrender to it: Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. I don't want it. I want it. I don't want it.

—Marie Howe, from an interview ]

#q

beguines

Kaveh Akbar, from "Forfeiting My Mystique", Pilgrim Bell

wizardmp3

ID: "All bodies become sicker / bodies - a kind of object / permanence, a curse bent / around our scalps resembling / grace only at the tattered / edges. It's so unsettling

to feel anything but good. / I wish I was only as cruel as / the first time I noticed / I was cruel, waving my tiny / shadow over a pond to scare / the copper minnows." End ID

#po

beforeyearning

prompt from @literaryvein-prompts, first lines, chose 'It was a pleasure to burn.—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)'

sunsounds

[text ID: it was a pleasure to burn at your touch. all of my want ended with a bird nest / filled with more tinder than hope & i was ready to ignite at the slightest / provocation— if you were to have met my gaze or even our hands / were to slightly graze, i would've been up in smoke before you even processed / what had happened. and perhaps it's a damning confession that the / yearning left me so volatile & your brand of warmth is what / my hands instinctively reach out to & that it really takes / so little to burn / but it's the culmination of years / of the little things / that's primed me / for the fire. end ID]

#po

ahotknife

megan lynne

sunsounds

[text ID: an exit wound that feels so fucking good // for three years i've had a bullet in my chest. / joan didion wrote do not whine. do not complain. / work harder. spend more time alone. / like any good disciple, i listened. / sometimes the bullet was soft, pink, gooey, barely there. / sometimes it burned blue with heat / & i laid in bed wondering if the work would kill me. / i did not whine when hunger sawed my body in half. / i did not complain when i walked for hours, / trying to get the sound of a sentence right. / i bled politely all over west virginia. // it is april. the work is done. / look, i have plucked the bullet from my body. / look, i ma not alone. look, i am alive. / purple wildflowers blooming everywhere. end ID]

#po

puremode

louise glück!!!!

amabit

[text id:

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn't expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring--

afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.]

#po

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how can the fields continue as simple fields?