Month: October 2018

Erin Wilson – Four Poems

Perhaps it’s easiest to say this — There are stones, bricks, metal and mountains. There is the great volume of space around these things. And there is how light shines down upon these things, warming them, making even the hardest surfaces shimmer.

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Wally Swist – Four Poems

What is peripheral is
              often not even what is considered,
                            but what passes just beyond
                                          our vision may momentarily

flutter there and be so enchanting
              that it offers a revelation as to
                            why butterflies are emblematic
                                          of the evanescent. 

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Alicia Pollard – Four Poems

The notes fall on our ears like petals to the earth,

And sound waves like the skirts of silver seas

Send rippling glassy swells through listeners’ souls –

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David Berman – Three Poems

As a poet who had studied under Robert Lowell and Archibald MacLeish, David Berman shared his impeccably beautiful formal verse with the Powows, but kept his darker, often free verse poems, in his notebooks.

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Charles D. Tarlton – Three Prosimetra

On the horizon, just over the tops of the yellow, red, and orange autumn woods, the clouds pile up slowly into the sky. It’s as if you were seeing these things for the first time.

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W. Luther Jett – Four Poems

Beauty is the lever which moves the soul — to action or reflection, to laughter or to tears, to passion or compassion, in company or in solitude.

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Karen Poppy – Four Poems

1963.
The year some French
Took too literally
Baudlaire,
And his poem, “The Cat”:

Félicette
Body electric,
Name ironic.
With ceremony,
Flung into space.

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Judith Skillman – Five Paintings

Without our star, how would we inhabit bodies of rich sensory perception with which to perceive, even partially, the faint and intermittent signals lumped together under the term “beauty”? From the darkness of our ordinary, often dreary and difficult lives, these signals—if we pause long enough from “information—can become art. These glimpses into the organic whole may even glimmer.

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Julie Rosenzweig – The Mirror

Fine-grained urbanism doesn’t hijack your attention; it invites you in. You don’t view it, you live it – calling to mind Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum about architecture being an art whose reception “is consummated […] in a state of distraction.” We often think of beauty as something to be contemplated at a remove. Like life, though, beauty can be something that simply happens while you’re busy making other plans.

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Aleda Bliss – Five Poems

beauty is profane. 
bursting through, it serves no other, vital for itself. and self as whole, and wholly beautiful. rough and wild, tender, true.

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The Lame Angel – Catulle Mendès (1885) Translated by Patricia Worth

I wish you could see what I see. A vast blue port sparkles in the afternoon sun that shines its bright band across the water. The dazzle makes me look left of it toward the bays and inlets and forested hills on the opposite shore. Below my balcony a cliff held together by lush shrubby trees drops steeply away to the esplanade, quiet on this cool May day.

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Diane Lee Moomey – Five Poems

I do think it’s beautiful when my pen has been circling a subject looking for a way in, and finds it; when I’ve been looking for something as perfect as an egg, and I find that, too. Beautiful.

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Jan Chronister – Five Poems

It may be in the sky, trees, flowers, wind or waves, and it is often fleeting. It can also be permanent, such as in great works of art, architecture, or cultural creations from around the world.

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Don Mager – Six Translations of Akhmatova

For the reader, a translation should simply lift from the page into her imagination in no way calling attention to how it was made, only how it sits in all its ravishment. If the translation’s beauty is authentic, the poem may sit in her memory as well.

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Kate Mahony – A part of the landscape

 It wasn’t until I returned home on the other side of the world that I realised what in essence I had been looking for on those evening strolls: the rejuvenating wildness of the sea, the smell of the salt spray, the incredible power and beauty I hadn’t recognised at the time.

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Dilantha Gunawardana – Three Poems

I find many examples of beauty in the surrounding nature, like the monkeys that gather in my garden, or the kingfisher, with a blue plumage, waiting for a lone fish, and the peacocks, who run havoc near the airport, not letting Argus blink even once.

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Accoutrements and Mandelbrot: Our Best of the Net nominations

I am, as the poet says, the stunned machine of her devotion. A dark pleated skirt, falling just past the knees. Black silk blouse, buttoned all the way. Pearls, of course, crystal earrings James gifted for her birthday, bangles, gold on each wrist. They caught the sunlight flowing in from the window, and I was dazzled.

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