Month: October 2016

Allison Grayhurst – Four Poems

It is a transient intimacy with truth, when the layers of life are exposed, revealed in a completed majesty. It is a fleeting experience, a halt in existence that our temporal selves cannot maintain. It arrives unexpectedly, when looking at the face of a child, an old person’s hands, an animal’s tenderness to another outside of its kind.

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Mark J. Mitchell – Three Poems

Often it is the curve of a line in one corner of painting that is otherwise unremarkable. Always it is the light in the eyes of the woman I have loved for forty years. It is too easy to get lost in big ambitions that lead you away from beauty.

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Charlotte Innes – Two Poems

Flickering through the poem is a kind of transformative light, often quite literally light, at different times of day, shining on every place

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Shelly Blankman – Japanese Tea Garden

It is a sense of peace. It is feeling my hair getting messed up in the wind at the beach. It is the sputtering of raindrops on a sunny day. It is the crackling of a fire. It is being at the zoo wrapped in the magnificence of animals whose spirits are entwined with mine. It is the childish delight of snowflakes on my tongue.

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Lana Bella – Four Poems

Beauty is getting out of bed every morning in a sun-speckled house smells of bacon, coffee that laces with whisky and a social strategy around my laptop that fends off a fur-shedding dog, busy-fingered children and a wryly pragmatic husband.

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Judith Skillman – Five Paintings

Judith Skillman is interested in the intense feelings engendered by the natural world. She loves the interplay of light between land and water. Her medium is oil on canvas, and she aspires to create an unlabored sensibility of the pastoral.

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Raymond Luczak – Two Poems

Words are simultaneously a passageway to the soul within and an escape plan to things far bigger than any of us combined. Words have been known to spark revolutions of all kinds; doesn’t matter if a revolution in question is a mere ripple on the water.

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Julie Kane – Three Poems

All that I really understand about the nature of beauty is that it is somehow bound up with time. When we witness something that overwhelms our senses with its beauty, we are briefly anchored in the present moment…

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Hedy Habra – Three Poems

Beauty lies in the process of creation; it is a flux, a constant quest for self-recreation as we project our versions of memory and aesthetic emotions on canvas or paper with a brush or a pen. Our perception of beauty is subjective but becomes more meaningful once shared, and once shared, it doesn’t belong to us anymore, the way a finished poem no longer pertains to its author.

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Ion Corcos – Four Poems

Our relationship with beauty can also lie beyond form. Form is impermanent, and though there is beauty in form, it is through form that we get to understand that which lies beyond form. To me, beauty is this essence, as well as impermanence.

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Robert Boucheron – Three Nourishments

Without our consent, the words we read resound in our heads. A moment comes when that inner sound—rhythm, cadence, alliteration, long and short vowels—rings perfectly true and wrings meaning from the words. Then the book feels light in our hands. We rise on an incoming tide.

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L.A. Weeks – Four Poems

As a bookseller, I enjoy watching readers overturn myths about poetry, beginning with the misconception that poetry somehow belongs to a select few. It belongs to everyman, and everyman’s buying poetry that, through beauty, connects our inner worlds.

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Cindy Frenkel – Two Poems

I feel a reservoir of joy well up when seeing momentary glimpses of beauty. It happens, too, when looking at someone I love. I also find huge pleasure in small, handmade treasures, a box covered in marbleized Italian paper or an exquisite letterpress card.

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Stephen Mead – Five Poems

I find it beautiful when I can still turn my attention/inspiration elsewhere, be free to share and celebrate what is bliss in the world, or what is gentleness; what is itself so much according to the nature of its essence as to release us, remind us of, as, Anne Sexton wrote, the birds making sense of air.

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Emily Strauss – Three Poems

We depend on poetry’s existence even if we don’t often encounter it, just as we should depend on the existence of natural wilderness even if we are never able to visit it in person. Its mere presence suffices to make us aware that life and the world are not all mundane, and can be viewed in a special lens when we need an extra push of the soul.

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Linda M. Crate – Two Poems

but pomegranate wine only ever carries bitterness, and the sky was purple that day with a sadness of its own; and she drank it in with open lips.

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KB Ballentine – Four Poems

Through tufts of grass, creeping jenny flickers and still the stones wait. Fog and dew web the meadow, the small cairn in the center. Ragged path rings the circle, fixed and frozen.

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Jonel Abellanosa – Five Poems

The mental worlds I create are inclusive in the sense that the reader is free to participate in the imaginings – I leave enough gaps in the poems for participation, and it is in the reader’s creative participation that beauty (real enough to be true) is born.

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Alyssa Yankwitt – Four Photographs

…and there it is: the beauty. it is not in the spinning, dizzying maze; the tea leaves are ineffectual against ephemera (everything lives in fragments). but there it is: the beauty. the beauty, which is seldom found in the translation, but rather in the wanting to know how.

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David M. Harris – The Art of Painting a Room

When I lived in Manhattan, I found West 10th Street beautiful. Now, in rural Tennessee, I get as much pleasure from the belted Galloway cattle. Much of beauty seems to depend on what you get to see, on what is around you.

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LeighAnna Schesser – Five Poems

Beauty is, perhaps, the supreme liminal space: the point of contact between who we used to be and who we could become; between profane and sacred, temporal and eternal, human and divine. Of the myriad ways to live out this calling, I have come to understand my own path as an aesthetic of joy, where is joy understood as something deeper and broader than mere pleasure, independent of temporary fulfillments.

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John Francis Istel – Leaves of Words

My poem “Leaves of Words” is a homage to urban beauty, to the unexpected and spectral, the extravagance of the everyday. It’s also a nod to the president of our Brooklyn poetry past, Walt Whitman…

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Lorette C. Luzajic – Four Peacocks

These are the things I contemplated as I walked among the peacocks at the Museo Dolores Olmeda estate grounds in Mexico City, taking pictures. I was surrounded by unspeakable beauty, by the kind of bird who coyly looked me in the eye and then spread out his fan of a tail for me in all its glory.

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Julieta Fuentes Roll – Three Poems

I feel beauty when I write, when I wear what I want, when I scream at the top of my lungs because I will not be silenced. I see beauty in others when they do the same. Beauty is letting yourself exist.

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Claudine Nash – Four Poems

As best and often as I can, I try slow my breath and pause my mind and immerse myself in the beauty that sits in the small moments so otherwise easily missed.

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Diana Raab – Five Poems

In Buddhism texts, there’s often a reference to the beauty of nature—the trees, the flowers, the mountains, and the animals. The lotus, which is often seen in Buddhist realms, is one of the most beautiful flowers. The way it grows in the mud and erupts into a spectacular living thing is phenomenal.

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Paul Bone – Three Poems

One way to think about poetry’s relationship to beauty is that poetry pays homage to the loss of the original experience but concentrates something of its essence through a transfiguration. It is a way of keeping the sun in a jar.

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100

There’s always more to do. But just a couple little things. And we do each small thing with gratitude and joy. Every day.

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Nadia Ibrashi – Two Poems

What I hope to achieve with my readers is a moment where our minds meet in that mysterious realm where beauty lies, and a spark of recognition yields a subterranean clarity, a sharpening of the senses and a softening of the heart.

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Michael Lee Johnson – Four Poems

If I were young again, I’d sing of coolness of high mountain snow flowers, sprinkle of night glow-blue meadows; I would dream and stretch slim fingers into distant nowhere, yawn slowly over endless prairie miles.

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Sarah Sarai – Three Children Are Laughing

Stendhal wrote, beauty is “the promise of happiness.” Thus beauty is conjectural, enigmatic, a stand-in for longing — that delectable neurosis. I would tell you its impact on or relation to my poetry, but then I would have to live up to my delusion.

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Armine Kotin Mortimer – Glenn Gould – Excerpt from Sollers

Separate yourself, take your distance, act as though you are not playing, as though you are not even hearing yourself. The error consists in believing that one is doing what one is doing when doing it. Above all, don’t attempt to attain silence or empty space. That is a pose. On the contrary, play as if you were in the middle of the street, at the heart of the racket…

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Martin Golan – The End of Tina

When I experience great beauty a part of me is out on a precipice, as when you look down from a very high cliff and even though you are perfectly safe your heart still races.

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KJ Hannah Greenberg – Six Photographs

When framing nature, I like using the muted light, which follows a storm, or which becomes available at dawn and dusk. Beyond that attention to a setting’s relative brightness and contrast, I try to work with whatever’s at hand.

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Douglas Cole – Fukushima

… Beauty is the back door with white spider webs in the corners I open and see the sun over that high grass and I am only three and lift my arms to that warm light thinking that’s where I came from. Beauty is a face in a shroud in a cloud in a crowded market, a deaf-mute handing me a pamphlet that says Blessed are the Thankful as I’m picking out an avocado.

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Uche Ogbuji – Four Poems

Beauty works up desire. Looking down an aspen valley in color from a mountain pass, one cannot hope to possess what they see, but they are compelled to return. When a poem lets beauty in at the eye–like love in the Yeats’s Drinking Song–or by the ear, the perceiver gains the pleasure of wonder that slowly sweeps through them, ever elusive.

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Beth Sherman – Sulphur

Who hasn’t been captivated by a tie dye sunset ? The delicate wings on a grasshopper as it peeks out from behind a tomato plant? Storm clouds tumbling across a sky as pale as eggshells?

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Carine Topal – Three Poems

For the women clutching reeds, leavened bread and precious wine,
may there be many birds casting seeds through the wind.
May each meal be wild with honey melting on the soft muscle
of your tongue.

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Sandra Kohler – Five Poems

I am writing for time, clarity, the lucidity of parsed
moments. I am writing to leave a small fossil that
says I lived pressed into the medium that killed me.

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David McVey – Hard Cop, Soft Cop

In all our work I believe we should strive to make our writing as elegant and readable and beautiful as it possibly can be in its context, whether we’re crafting a lyrical poem or writing a letter to the company that unblocks our drains.

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Charles Musser – Two Poems

Unleaf yourself beneath the Bois d’arc tree and let my chisel-tongue inscribe your bloom with glyphs, the cuneiform for vine and grape.

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Fay Loomis – The Opal Necklace

The ensouled energy behind form invites us to experience beauty in its sublimest moments. Our breath is taken away, we are imperceptibly still, one with the cosmos.

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