Month: June 2017

Judy Katz-Levine – Five Poems

The power in a writer’s force is one which brings compassion and a change of vision and action to the receiver. So beauty is more than an aesthetic which pleases, but a dynamic in which a poet or writer, musician or visual or conceptual artist attempts to open the receiver’s vision so an act of mercy or courage will result

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Marjorie Power – Five Poems

“I walk with beauty before me. I walk with beauty behind me. I walk with beauty below me. I walk with beauty around me. My words will be beautiful.”

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Diana Conces – Five Photographs

“Beauty is dynamic and built on context and relationships, we find it fascinating and elusive, the flashes of fire in an opal, the way the words of a beloved character remind us inexplicably of a grandmother, the shimmer of reflected cypress trees in a still lake.”

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Libby Maxey – Five Poems

I want to make music for things that have no anthems. I want to conjure warm stories from cold ashes. Gathering wreckage into a balanced, harmonious form is not a betrayal of the truth, but rather a resurrection as true as any fall.

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Ellie Potvin – Toast

We can choose how we will react to the world and people around us. We can make it a daily plan to forgive those who have hurt us. We can choose love. We can also choose to set a goal for ourselves, to do one thing of beauty each day.

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Stephanie Madan – Three Poems

I’ve come to discover beauty in the everyday. In that lumpy heirloom tomato, the fresh shiny ebony paint on the stair rail, the gleam of slanted sunlight ricocheting off a silver vase – beauty valuable in its tiny moments, deflecting, sometimes, the ugliness we endure these days in our wide world. It has to be enough.

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Tricia Knoll – Five Poems

What I see as beautiful is the gifts of this season. Today’s ripe Oregon strawberries, the smell of one of my pink rosebushes and then the mock orange that bloomed for the first time this year. The promise in my garden of ripe tomatoes and pea pods in the weeks ahead.

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Matthew James Friday – Three Poems

Beauty is refusing to be beaten: dwarfed by decades but dressed like a teen with summer slipped over a bright bikini, blonde hair, outrageously large sunglasses. She went up an elevator in a shopping mall while a young couple came down, looked down, noticed, sniggered, whispered about this youthful soul refusing to age appropriately.

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Samuel Salerno – Three Poems

I think the mind creates its world. It houses the keys to form. The museum is not an actual place but a context of memory, association, and intense focus. Beauty is the spirit level that reminds us we are alive.

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Maximilian Heinegg – Four Poems

The process of making beauty is, to me, getting the conscious, ego-clamoring mind out of the way, and letting the experience speak for itself, or becoming the conduit for what generous work the subconscious has done.

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Carol Barrett – Four Poems

A moment of surprise, the unexpected suddenly thrust into view, disrupting whatever anxious reverie or immediate concerns had been preoccupying me

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Ruth Asch – Five Poems

Beauty changes you, if only for a subtle moment. It strengthens the pulse, gathers and releases breath, expands the heart, glows in the mind. Unless you shut it out, beauty engages you in a relationship…

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Michael Lyle – Four Poems

Rather than being observed or judged, beauty must be discovered and absorbed through the lens of amazement (…) The world is sacramental beauty and all within it wear a crown.

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Sara Martin – Coquinas

Our task is to pay attention, to notice that glint of sunlight on the water, the drops of dew on blades of grass, the red flash of a cardinal against a gray winter day, fireflies blinking in the dark, and stars scattered like glitter across the black northern sky.

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David M. Harris – Four Poems

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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Alexander Cigale – Five Translations of Andrey Guschin

Andrey Guschin identifies himself as a “neo-archeist” poet, and the primary attraction to me as a translator of his lively and inventive formal verses was that what I view as a resurgence of the use of archaism and archaic words in contemporary American poetry, may yield for the work a readership in English.

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Wren Tuatha – Four Poems

For my poetry, I make lists of “shiny things,” the mundane and random details of my days. I populate my poems with these. I adore the beauty in my goat Rye dancing, the fringe of pine needles hanging in my manzanita tree, and a website dedicated to artful, competitive shoelace tying.

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Mark Mansfield – Five Poems

Beauty will always resist too much of our taking things apart to take a look inside, which isn’t too say that beauty cannot be analyzed. But there comes a point when the mystery of what’s puzzled over exceeds whatever pieces are missing, which may not be missing at all.

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