The Voices of Venus part of the evening was the 4 slam winners. If you expected it a repetition of the last, nope. They were given a bigger canvas, about 20 minutes each to stretch over more stories, exploring compelling monologues.

Sepideh made for literal chills. I got goosebumps so often, I got cold. She’s the second performer in two days to do that.
She told stories from time in South Africa with a woman everyone called Mama. Told of the Indian people who when brought to South Africa kept their culture from India due to apartheid separation yet had never seen the sub-continent. She contrasted the land and life there where she’d stayed with the sights and sites she saw when she stayed by the Ganges.
More stories came from the time she spent last year in the biggest city in Bangladesh. More stories from rebuilding of Tehran. She packs an amazing wallop with the way she weaves. She told of the ladies in the black-cloaked attire with the pure hearts, told me of his smile..
She’s done a lot of living. Somehow, pegging her for her mid-30s I considered, that’s wonderful insights and dexterity of metaphors and stage presence, theatrical skill. But, apparently, she’s only 21. Oy. So much living already.

Festrell also gave her powerful stories. Some I’d heard, some I hadn’t. One was of being brought up short by mom for criticizing the Filipino look. Anyone who criticized that is ignorance that the flat round face was the sign of royalty. She went thru, feature by feature and the lineage of honor. There’s a whole other system of equally valid and long-historied notions of beauty.

Missed her? You had crummy luck. She was lively.
She minced no words for those who waste not just her time but her body and mind: “He’s the Delilah to my Sampson. He’s the male version of Jezebel. I’m ad…dicted… to a dickhead.”
She expressed gratitude to be there, clarifying that it’s not a humblebrag that she doesn’t deserve it because that would be trying to complain about the gift God gave of talent. She’s not proud and not ashamed. She just is going to get on with the next poem for everyone.
Check at D-Lightfull’s blog.

Elle P talked her way quietly. The sound guy was on the ball and cranked for her of very small voice. She did most “off script” and some from the book, new material and older.

Allison thanks all the readers of the first event (first pic). Bardia Sinaee (middle) is the second host. He introduced Christian McPherson (third pic), one of 4 authors they brought to the evening.
It is the 11th year of In/Words, a Carleton University student run literary magazine. It was the issue launch of vol. 11, issue 1 and the launch of Moose & Pussy’s first CD: Oral. It has 17 tracks, including one of a poem of mine and ones from Jeff Blackman, Jenna Jarvis and Diane Seuss.
Bardia brought out of the archives all kinds of shapes the magazine has taken over the years, including one issue which had a centrefold of Irving Layton.

Rachael Simpson was one of the editors of Vagina Dentata, an in/words special erotica magazine. She’s in the Pith & Wry anthology but I haven’t read it all. Still was not on my radar. Until her poems last night.
In a poem about god’s love of beetles, among other things she asks “when our foot goes through rotting wood, do we think we are rotting?”
She has an attention to details, such as the economy of words for gestures, describing someone packing away the things of a dead or otherwise out of the picture husband, getting rid of his things with haste, packing away jars as if they were already broken. What a wonderful nod to zen’s glass that breaks, was always broken. The world as Schrödinger’s paradox. And it gets to the kind of movement, the nervousness and sureness mixed.
Ben Ladouceur said of Rachael Simpson’s reading: “Her work and her reading voice both brim with an unadorned kind of insightfulness. Never mind that her name is probably the least-known of the four.”

Gregory Scofield was also one of the invited readers of the In/Words hosted part of the evening. He apologized for yanking us along thru Metis history at such a clip, skipping decades as if it were history class on fast forward. He described his process of discovering the man behind the legend of Louis Riel, who sometimes signed his name Louis “David” Riel. The David portion was from feeling a connection to the biblical David, a man 1/8 of one blood, from a huge family, from a struggle against an oppressive Goliath.
His book Louis: Heretic Poems, 40-odd years in the germination, goes thru the life of the Metis leader, who also was a poet. He rolls in some of Louis’ poems. He reminds that the “Rebellion” is a misnomer. It was a “Resistance” because John A. was not the given leader of land he had no claim over.

Helen Humphreys has many novels and poetry collections. I feel like someone should have told me long ago. But then I don’t “do” novels as a rule.
What a comic point of view she has in her latest novel, The Reinvention of Love, which sold out all copies after she read from it last night.
Often you’re on thin ice when writing about a neurotic writer writing a novel but she pulls it off. An irate young man comes into the poetry office because his love poems were rejected. Internal monologue and external dialogue and finally the young man demands a duel with the weapon on the editor’s choice. “Fine,” the editor says, “I choose spelling. You’re dead.”
I’m thinking I also want to hunt down her series of connected short stories The Frozen Thames.

Kevin and Dave welcome everyone to the opening night of Versefest. It was a good turnout. People who came were jazzed about the chance to be there and looking forward to a good show.

The book table seemed to get some steady browsing before and in breaks.
Amanda was feeling under the weather but she jotted notes on events too.
Another dozen photos or so are with rest of the Slideshow of Versefest pics that I took so far.
Highlights for me are a bit towards…well, most everything.

Paul Tyler kicked it off with reading some poems from A Short History of Forgetting (vid link to previous reading from). And some new work. His are thinking poems. They work their way thru the natural world. I had a previous fondness for banana slugs but hearing his poem of them, love them more. He has such a great reading voice. I forget that when I read his poems on the page.

Suzanne Buffam read a little bit from her book, The Irrationalist but mostly from new poems, which she described as being the product of becoming a mom; they’re list poems. (But what she can do with a list.) She builds a setup and breaks it with comic timing to relieve tension and then one more tap for depth. She plays in the dexterity sandbox with David McGimpsy; a bit of clever, standup, a bit of profound. It was lovely to see shoulders around me shake with laughter.
Her lists included: Impossible things (which weren’t your lame usual list, although I forget now what she said), books I’d like to read (I remember the comic contrast punchline for that but without the setup, I’d be giving a spoiler), words with beautiful sounds that belong to ugly things, and terrible ideas that are probably commercially viable, like hamster farm babysitting. Somewhere in there she has a densely kapowing poem that said I want water to be thirsty for me.

Dennis Lee seemed to have some people delightedly chuckling at his verses and lining up for signatures after. He tried to get the audience to do a refrain of “on my air guitar” but only a couple people picked it up. (Perhaps he didn’t signal enough? Perhaps it was the crowd? During a later reading, finger-snap was agitating a woman who kept glaring back, not familiar with the tradition.)
The interview with him yesterday was chosen for podcasting so check All in a Day‘s sidebar for that. He released his Testament yesterday by a special rush from his publisher, Anansi. It arrived in house after the readings started with a call update from Kate from the back at the end of his reading confirming it arrived in the nick of time. (It doesn’t officially release for sale in Canada until March 1st.) Host Alan Neal quipped that there hasn’t been a announcement of the new testament being ready for some centuries.

As Alan Neal suggested it was like the whole night was choreographed from years ago just for us for tonight with the first poet having a poem of pigeons, the second poet having one of armageddon and the third with the phrase “pigeon armageddon”.
There was a half hour break to chat and get a drink, bite to eat, book or CD or few. Then at 9pm we were back with the second set.

Shauntay Grant at Versefest swept me away. I have rarely felt such presence. Without knowing who she was in a crowd, she owned every step she walked. Normally at a reading crowd the nervous spiking energy of people who will read will give off a static. Even if I don’t know the faces, I can usually tell who will read or present. She was at home.
And her poems. I thought to record phrases but I may as well draw in dust as write best phrases. There was a large sweep of how it all fit together. If I told you that father is ocean and mother is the sun sinking into him, it wouldn’t convey anything of how the cadences, music, rhymes, rhythms and power used that vehicle of concept. One poem ran parallel threads of repetition of problem and letting it go, (say, people who are activists not because they want a solution to the problem but because they like the cachet of the title: that’s life, people who say friend but don’t understand what trusts friendship entail: that’s life.) It tied together in an expected time and way to flip the same words into a celebration of life working and being glorious. It was uplifting not for claiming calm and talking only of happy safe subjects but affirming not just a surviving but a thriving outcome despite that is possible.

Afua Cooper closed the first night with stories of slave history, such as the woman who burnt down Montreal in 1734. She has it in a book form: The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal (HarperCollins) which retells the oldest slave narrative in the Americas. She also talked of the private black graves that don’t stay unmarked and disappeared with boned shaking off their ashes from farmer’s corn fields.
She dislodged me as she talked of a field with thorn bushes at it edges. Dad told me in the old days when there were no needles, people used these to darn with. Dad took me when I was small. He took me only once down a farmer’s lane off into a field off a side road and we stood in the late fall long grasses without explanation.
He looked around, unsure of whether it was trespassing or unsure whether we would get caught. Or maybe he was afraid he couldn’t find the spot. Kicking around, there were badly eroding footmarkers. He told me there is where your ancestors are. It used to be common to have private burial plots on your own land. Wonder if I can find it.
Tonight, 7pm, we start again.

Such an impression constellation coming out at Versefest this week.
It starts tonight at 7pm with Paul Tyler, Suzanne Buffam, Dennis Lee, then at 9pm Shauntay Grant and Afua Cooper. Both events will be hosted by CBC Radio’s All In a Day host Alan Neal. (Catch his interview with Dennis on the program between 4:30 and 5:00).
The following day it’s those ladies I blogged about, Sepideh, D-Lightfull, Festrell and Elle P, then Helen Humphreys, Christian McPherson, Gregory Scofield and Rachael Simpson.
On Friday I’ll be reading with Bruce Taylor and Susan McMaster hosted by Steve Z.
4 days of almost 3 dozen more performances come after that. Even for Ottawa, that’s dense feeding.
Each reading is sponsored by one of the reading series in town who participated with the planning. The festival closes with The Summit Reading with the Ottawa International Writers Festival on Sunday night with support from the embassies of México and the United States. It’ll have 3 of North America’s big poets: United States’ Philip Levine, Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet and National Book Award-winner, México’s Pura López-Colomé, winner of the Xavier Villurrutia Prize and Canada’s Phil Hall, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.
That’s set to start at 8pm on Sunday March 4th at the National Arts Centre (Panorama Room). (Do watch the listings. Most are at Arts Court but some shift venues.) Details are here.
Tickets? At the door, online, or from Collected Works and the Manx Pub.
Wondering what to see?
Amanda’s written a primer on performers with links to interviews and videos.
$50 for a festival pass.
Do it all.
(Bring your own popcorn.)

If you don’t need to say it, why are you talking?
Because fully formed doesn’t happen without a process to improv and improve. Many failures for decades is the route to success.
Poems that don’t know what their point is take risks, explore. Poems that know their form but not their content or their content but not their form have places to go. They aren’t a spindrift repeating the same notion you went in with until you leave with the same. They broker in the bank of ‘why would you write that?’ with the best answer of ‘because.’
Dan Barden in Workshop: A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes

It’s the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again.
Also, that’s the difference between a seminar and a workshop. In my junior honors seminar at Berkeley, we read Paradise Lost because Paradise Lost demands to be read. We may not have known that when we walked in the door, but we sure as hell knew it by June. You could bury that poem for ten thousand years, let it be dug up by a culture that has forgotten our language, and within a decade people would be reading Milton again.
What happened, I think, on the road from seminar to workshop, was that we lost sight of the fact that we must write for an audience—an audience that is us (the people sitting around the table) but also not us (people who are sitting everywhere but at that table).

I’ve written with dead earnest seriousness, taken workshops, given workshops, self-defined as a poet for 25-odd years, but does that mean I’m getting anywhere?
It has ratcheted me open, conveyed me to like-minds who wish to understand similarly, helped me decode humans, amused and entertained me, helped me survive in a very real sense, but the level of craft I still feel like I’m drawing with thick crayons.
People who are starting out seem to be learning to distinguish their fingers from the toes from the blanket. Some people have moved past me to pens and printing but the quill-penmanship level isn’t a person so much as a moment here and there for anyone, maybe even sustained for a few phrases, or whole poem.
If the next poem reiterates, does it work? Or is it a tracework, a copied outline on onion paper that looks the same except the spirit is different?

The active stack of currently reading is a bit scattered about the house. (I figure over the last month about 2 dozen chapbooks and perhaps more than a dozen books have arrived here.)
My focus is deconstructing salient. By what mechanisms does my interest get dulled or more keen? What would ideal look like? What is this idea of poetry as transformative of reader or writer? I’m skeptical of it but maybe that’s a matter of terms and I call the process something else in another framework of words. Poetry that jolts the spine and nudges life path to pay attention to other things or pull back, is that a form of transformation?
What about poetry that snaps me shut at the keyword bingo of words that only poets use disproportionally, poetly words that dismay me: cerulean, scythe, shimmer, crepuscular, pain, moon and oh yes, any Greek god. Is closure a form of transformation? Is threat? Is being made scared a form of change? Or must transforming be towards the more all-embracing unity, clarity and calm?
I sit up straight at:
Nuclear by Juliana Spahr (1991), via Duration Press pdf.

sediment ponds where radioactive waters cool
contaminated clusters of buildings
there is an urgency to be respectful of this material
these are sacred sites
these are illustrations of necessities

There’s so much to write of other than self. A world of mentioning what consciousness has been raised about. The wider scope, the microscope. Not only the tilt of trees and salt of trunks. Yet as quickly as I engage, I fatigue quickly too.
It’s retelling history. There’s a passion, beauty, details and momentum but ultimately it’s lecturing that requires no audience. Action to respond to the actionable issues talked about requires people but the poetry is telling, isn’t a dialogue. There’s no room for an equal, only obedience or disagreement.
I’ve said before I’m a sucker for poems that turn against themselves, a pivot that is not drama plot-driven but a point of view undoing itself, reconsidering mid-stream. An unreliable narrator is more interesting than one sure of opinions and sure-footed unless there is so very fancy footwork indeed.
*
Angela Leuck‘s Suddenly a Desire: Rose Tanka (Bondi Studios, 2010) p. 9,

you didn’t come
to admire the roses –
so chilly now
in the summer dress
I wore for you

Incredibly vulnerable poem. Much would depend on the intonation of the last line. Petulant? Bitter? Broken? Angry? It seems more delicate than there, a kind of soft, oh, disappointment and not yet back together enough to know what to do next.
Women and tanka have had a long history. Leuck gave a talk on haiku mentioning Masajo Susuki who spent a good portion of her 96-year lifetime writing poems of desire. Leuck has four previous books that pair flowers and love.
*
rob mclennan’s grief notes (Blaze vox, 2012) p. 33

grief notes: miniature,
weather swims,
conversation-bare
& remorse, thought
I’d never,

Those pivots are lovely. Lines stand alone or continue on. So many poets need to unpack everything at length when really, when we can see where it’s going and it doesn’t veer off course, why continue? The writing is tight. Talk is about emotional life and despite the title of grief, it is not a sentimental wallow but clear-sighted with a similar kind frankness to self as Angela’s above.
*
Anthony Rizcallah Ferris’ translation of Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran (Citadel Press, 1962), p. 14

Some souls are like sponges> You cannot squeeze anything out of them except for what they have sucked from you.

Lots of statements of judgements yet curious, some I hadn’t seen that way. Blunt and aphoristic, I’ll give a sort thru from time to time. Many find his writing striking. It drives me a tad towards batty when others can see pleasure and beauty where I can’t. I’ll see if I can glimpse.
*
Joseph Massey’s At the Point (Shearsman, 2011).
A collected of his chapbooks, most, but not all of which, I have. I’m curious to see how it all rolls together and sits in new juxtapositions of other poems. He has such a keen attention to sound and minimalist cadence. It’ll take a couple afternoons of quiet rooms to take it in properly.
*
an’ya’s set of chapbooks, seasonal.
I must admit I was pulled in by the sumptious paper with flowers and leaves embedded, inner pages with ink paintings and stamped and hand lettering. Won me over with the words, particularly in booklet 1

new year eaves
the icicle’s shape
exits itself

A shape exiting itself as a way to think of melting is so striking as a concept. A few reads later I see the play of eves/eaves.
*
Rob Taylor‘s The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011).
I’ve been curious about his writing, seeing his chapbooks appear and go out of print. On first look thru looks like autobiographical storytelling, a book structured as best-of poems rather than related poems towards a general meta-level story of book. Still, a curious curve in them such as p. 32, “Creation Stories” starts,

She has her narratives, he has his,
and together they move through the world.
Their scripts are filled with the same set pieces, same characters,
yet they are blocked differently, recite different lines.

Ain’t that the truth? We have the same experiences yet rarely the same experiences. Each by where they’ve been catch onto different aspects, ignore other aspects. The variability of the experience even changes over time as memory drops some things, lumps together future events, conflating and debating what really occurred and deciding. Until we meet someone with the “shared experience”.
*
Mayfly, Summer 2009 issue.
I’ve heard of this magazine but hadn’t laid eyes on a copy before. Curious about this U.S. haiku magazine. Not opened yet.
*
Sean Howard’s Incitements (Gaspereau Press, 2011)
A gorgeous hand-feel of a book. The dust jacket and inner book cover show such attention to beauty. Sweet font. A publisher who knows how to balance text in a page. Even the page numbers have a loveliness to them.
The text goes thru other people’s texts and does cut ups. Sounds intriguing as an approach. It could go well or badly.
2/3 of short lines end in a hyphenated break in the word. It is either rigorously mathematically called for and cleverly considered and sensical or arbitrary styling that will work in some places and not in others. The books is effectively non-scannable as phrases and words are all broken to bits. Nearly the entire book held to tercets.
By title it aims to be an irritant/agitator, I presume. (When I’m not cranky-bent, I’ll have to cycle back to this.)
*
Peter Hughes & Simon Marsh collaborated to make The Pistol Tree Poems (Shearsman, 2011).
The poems are driven by a mathematical structure. They start with this 53 line poem and go back and forth with each reply over 4 years, dropping the size of verbal canvas by 1 line until it is only 1 line each.
At times the exchange of conversation echoes in form; one does saw tooth, then the other. A solid block, for solid block. One inserts quotes, etc.
They have a renga-feel to them, for example, one mentioning shadows, (“tiles of/primary brightness/cast in/muntin shadow) the other replying the sunlight cast in a niche with a stuffed weasel in it. (Any poem is alright by me to be an autobiographical story if that story starts “I have dusted the stuffed weasel”.)
*
John C. Goodman’s The Shepherd’s Elegy (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, UK, 2011)
Format-wise I may have to scan an except because html would not happily do some of this formating, but its not formatting for its own sake. Although at times I don’t “understand” what I’m reading, it is striking and absorbing. There is a play at work in some of the pieces that deconstructs words and ideas by letters. It mixes in another language and flows forward here and there. I have only got halfway but from early on it was flagged for re-reading and “hey – listen to this one” or “ooh, look at this!”
*
Fay Aoyagi’s In Borrowed Shoes (Blue Willow Press, 2006), p 49

ants out of a hole –
when did I stop playing
the red toy piano?

Two bits of life colliding. Who knows the why of the when and yet it seems a good mirror of life. She keeps to the spectrum of haiku where there is a contrast, two elements in contrast or complementing in a fresh way. The poem unfolds in the mind, not unfolded for you by the poet. p. 82

withered grass –
footsteps of an assassin
become mine

Season is set, that late fall, after the ground freezes. Who hasn’t walked alone to think, by footsteps or shadows, they are being followed to realize self-consciously, that it is one’s own self one perceives. And then that turn outward to could self be in a withered season, a killer. It is a kind of compassion to conflate or equate capacity of the Other and that of the self.
*
eclipse, fall 1997 issue
It features Gloria Escomel, Salvador Torres, Carmen Rodriguez and Jorge Etcheverry. Jorge is going to be one of the readers at an April reading I’m organizing with the good people of SLOWest Coffeehouse. (FB info) Haven’t cracked open yet but when life passes something relevant into your hands…
*
Soundings, edited by Christopher Levenson and Brian Cameron (Buschek, 2005)
This anthology of some of the Ottawa poets I’d meant to get for some time. Former classmates and professor and people I’ve met since. I’m curious to go thru the selections.
I was curious what Brick Billing had done since last I’d seen of his writing but although it was 8 years between seeing that and the book being published, the poem was from 1996, so he’d still be in university student life rather than on the prof side of things.
By time poems get to an anthology, the poems are often ancient news for the poet who is a project or several past there. It’s a snapshot in time if nothing else.
*
Peter F Yacht Club, versefest edition
Much to look forward to reading in here as it has a lot of people I know I enjoy the writing of and others I’m curious about their new work.
Paige Ackerson-Kiely has 3 poems in the issue, one entitled Kintsugi, a wonderful term meaning to fix broken pottery by filling the crack with resin and gold. It goes,

Expunged from the wont of them.
The firm feelings, like stacked plates
pushing toward the back
of the cabinet. Not to be used, nor eaten
from. There are a dozen ways to give
to your neighbour: the fence, cups of sugar,
removal of snow and what it portends.
You may have the air I sucked;
the whore I told things to.
Verisimilitude, complacent crack –
how damaged we became
to catch a break, to be touched, mended
was my belief in humanity.

What an interesting turn about within the poem. The practice of Kintsugi involved not only mending but claims that potters broke the pots on purpose just so they could have the decorative mending. It sort of takes wabi-sabi to the level of artifice, affectation. Transience and brokenness in vogue, rather evoking the confessional poet that when there’s no more things to confess just exaggerate pure imagination to keep the habit going, or look for trouble to perpetuate the art.
What’s the alternative to healing? We can pretend we move on, let the unresolved rot, shuck old selves. Like Pulitzer novelist Margaret Mitchell said, “I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken — and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.”
There’s some depth to this poem as it contemplates the interconnections between people, our relationships to our own cracked places. Interesting twist at the end that it “was my belief”. What is it now? Is the social contract greater or lesser or torn up? What is humanity for if not to connect with?
*
Leslie Vryenhoek’s Gulf (Oolichan, 2011)
Gulf was something of a gulp. I read it all in 2 days, the first 70 pages in a bite. Not that it is light reading, but it is beautiful reading with little pings of insight thru it. “Coming back, again, again” may be the most effective poem I’ve read on the chemical state of depression.
The book as a whole seems a taking stock of life thus far, a recounting of coming of age at each decade with the clear vision of hindsight against the disorientation of moving. There’s a compassion for past self that is a hallmark of the poem. The common thread binds all the poems but the amount of change in relationship to moving and what is told makes it not a poem retelling one story too long.
*
Secession by Chus Pato, translated by Erin Moure, I haven’t yet started.
*
Economies of Scale: derek beaulieu interviews rob mclennan (above/ground, 2012), I haven’t started yet.
*
in pdf, It‘s Alive She Says by Cole Swensen, p. 28

We remember so little
we may as well live
in windows. People in movies
are as kind as split seconds.

There’s something about Cole’s cadence that allows me to readily hear. in p. 29, “Please”

Please.
I’m going to ask you
one thing
don’t bring on
the future yet,
there is a moment
I need to return to
a moment that lives
in a valley between
our breath
and our breathing.

Is it just a matter of bias lining up so the ideas reinforce my point of view, elaborate in different words the things I’m already attracted to so it becomes not new information but a kind of yay-saying in a more complex form? Or do I expose myself to so much that I disagree with, break my head on what I don’t understand so a safe place of beautifully phrased contemplations on what I could agree with provides a service of comfort, overlap and extension?
*
Nobody by Michael Laskey at Writer’s Almanac.

a snowball or two to fling
at the pine tree trunk, at least
find some reason to take you out
of yourself: scrape a patch of grass clear
for the birds maybe; prod at your shrubs

What a beautiful way to do a stanza break. The thought is complete and stands alone and then works to extend. A poem of kindness to self, to get out of the chair and into the world with your animal self to go snuffle about. While more of an instruction and lecture of exhortation than story or language play, it is writing that serves. And advice I’ll soon heed.
*
What does it take for a poem to have the weight and hold of salience and significance? What makes me go from skim to stand still and pay attention?
If poetry is an extension of life, temperament, personality, class, worldview, comparable ratios and bents should yield a construction of ideas that appeal…ugh, almost had it.
I feel like I’m getting closer to understanding.
The easy plot arc, the writing poems as if they were a novel where conflict is built in to hook forward, even if done well, is a parlour game. That doesn’t prevent or ensure a good read.
At the same time it beats my brain the anecdote that Ray Souster wrote smooth poems and then beat them up to make them less pretty, to add hiccups. Sort of like washing hair then gelling them into super-hold just out of bed look.
A poem can be too finished or missing too many pieces for me, or be too elaborated. (Where is my sweet spot exactly?)
Infinite diversity, infinite beauty and yet some beauties don’t line up behind my fenceline of filter. Some I can get a better view of.
*
Poetry talk is this new awesome poetry round up column Amanda Earl has started.