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Everything Around a Central Meaning
The first poem in the current issue of Image (#71) has me mesmerized. And it’s the perfect poem for Lent. “Pantoum for Seven Words,” it’s called—by Amy Newman. I confess that I had to look up the definition of “pantoum.” It’s “a Malay verse form consisting of an indefinite number of quatrains with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the following..."
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A Poem is a Walk
One of the students in my Glen Online course, "Poetry as a Spiritual Practice," emailed me to ask what exactly I meant by “strolling along with a poem.” In the lecture for the lesson she was working on, I’d said that “I sometimes read a poem as if I were taking a stroll through it or along with it. The stroll is leisurely, because poetry never rushes us. Poetry paces itself so that its rhythms, its sound-echoes....
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Poems for the Season
Sometimes with my Christmas cards I include a favorite seasonal poem. So consider this post a greeting card for the season. First, I can’t resist sharing the poem that has been my meditation this Advent. I always treasure Advent’s special spirit of hushed longing. This year I’ve found it expressed in a poem not written specifically for Advent: Robert Bly’s “The Roof Nail,” in his new collection Talking into the Ear of a Donkey....
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Judging Donald Hall
“When you like a woman, / you talk and talk. / One night you kiss. / Another night you fuck.” “After their tumult, as they quieted, / She breathed into his ear / The tunes she loved to sing.” “When love empties itself out, / it fills our bodies full. / For an hour we lie twining / pulse and skin together....” These lines are from three poems in the new collection by Donald Hall, one of America’s most revered poets....
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In Line with Truth?
When I first began to think of myself as a writer, a few decades ago, I’d type onto file cards the wisdom of writers I wanted to emulate and thumbtack the cards to the bulletin board above my desk. I had several lines about the writer’s vocation by Flannery O’Connor and G.K. Chesterton. But the one I’m recalling right now is by Simone Weil. I no longer have the file card....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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