Poem in a Landscape

for Walter Bradford   1. This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind. 2. Salve salvage in the spin. Endorse the splendor splashes; stylize the flawed utility; prop a malign or failing light–…

Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “The Second Sermon on the Warpland” enters through my head and my feet, its truth shooting through my chest, out of my throat and my fingertips. I know discussions of poems tend to have a linear trajectory,

The poem begins with a literal bang, reminiscent of an airstrike—“A sudden blow: . . . ” That first phrase of William Butler Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” is followed by a quatrain-long sentence describing how Zeus, in the form of a swan,

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push…

The town had a smokestack. It had a church spire. The church was prettier, but the smokestack was higher. It was a lone ruined column, a single snuffed taper, a field gun fired at heaven,

In the fall of 1972, I was a new graduate student, at a university ten times the size of my undergraduate school, in an unfamiliar city far from my old home in the suburbs of Washington, D. C. I was…

I. de Las Piedras del Cielo De endurecer la tierra se encargaron las piedras: pronto tuvieron alas: las piedras que volaron: las que sobrevivieron subieron el relámpago,