#poetspickpoems

[cultsoc]

Contributed by Kimberley Yurkiewicz: "Amanda Nadelberg, ‘Dymphna,' Isa the Truck Named Isadore (2006). i wanted to highlight a poet who’s part of our cultsoc history, though we never published her books. how lovely to catch people on their way up! amanda has since created bigger works, finer poems, but these remain delightful surprises – each its own tiny present. back then they felt private, outside a shared time or space, but now return me TO a specific place. one where we sold books out of the side of our stationery shop, and young women wrote charming and clever poems for days. all secrets and adventures and quiet sweetness."

[cultsoc]

Contributed by Mark Scroggins: “J. H. Prynne. Wound Response, 1974, p19. There's nothing I don't love about this poem, which for me represents one perfect limit of the short lyric—its delicate and deliberate music of vowel and consonant sounds; the cunning movements of line-break and spacing; its mixture of naturalistic description, cosmological wonder, and folk-song narrative; its interweaving of diverse registers of diction, from the standard-issue English poetic to the weirdly archaic.” #napomo #cultsoc15 #markscroggins #jhprynne #poetspickpoems #poetry #books

[cultsoc]

From Devin Johnston: "Randolph Stow, 'Landfall' from A Counterfeit Silence (Angus & Robertson, 1969). I love the gesture of refusal, both wistful and absurd, a poem built on mystery and silence." #napomo #cultsoc15 #devinjohnston #randolphstow #poetspickpoems #poetry # books

[cultsoc]

Contributed by Steven Toussaint: “Jennifer Moxley, ‘A Foolish Consistency,’ The Open Secret, 2014. One of my favorite poems published in the last few years, it so beautifully captures the dawning of a vocation in poetry, of learning how to hear.”

[cultsoc]

Contributed by Joseph Massey: Kristen Case, “From the FDR in Early Evening…,” Little Arias, 2015. This poem lights up just as it gets dark, a process equally internal as external. I love that; I love how it moves. A whole world – here – in a slow flash.“

[cultsoc]

Contributed by Whit Griffin: "Gerrit Lansing, from Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth, 2009. Gerrit Lansing is an occult oracle for me.  I love his lines.  And this poem is dedicated to Tom Meyer, who is one of my dearest friends."

[cultsoc]

Contributed by Shannon Tharp: “Laura Jensen, ‘The Goodyear Blimp,’ from Memory (1982). I read this poem for the first time when I lived in Seattle, 34 miles from Laura Jensen’s hometown of Tacoma. Years later, the poem still has nothing to do with water and still leaves me with the feeling of having stood near water on a Pacific Northwest beach in perfect sun. The poem also meets me where I am now, Wyoming, and reminds me of another place I’ve lived: Iowa. What I’m getting at with this little history is that, if one takes care in reading Jensen’s poem, one ends up occupied by multiple realms—all of which could be said to be a part of 'the brief sweet world of the saved.' I’m so grateful this luminous transmission of feeling-thinking exists.” @mmebottomline

[cultsoc]

Contributed by Zach Barocas: "James Wright, 'Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,' The Branch Will Not Break, 1963. This poem possesses an arresting balance. If simile will serve, it seems to me a tightrope walk, a known and rehearsed course but no less risky for that knowledge. This is a poem holding its breath for as long as it can, knowing it must eventually exhale."