In his post, the joy of revision, Robert Peake talks about looking at a poem’s elemental structure and intentions, and about the benefits of workshops for aesthetic calibration:

it is through input from other self-aware readers that poets can often develop most quickly, learning through feedback how their decisions affect a receptive other. Through both giving and receiving input on poems, the poet also increasingly learns to act as this receptive other for herself in composing and writing her own poems. This is why workshop groups can provide a powerful boost to the development of any writer, and especially poets.
Yet, due to the subjective nature of poetry, and the inevitable realities of interpersonal dynamics, workshop groups can tend toward consensus, which favors the safety of the known, and therefore tends toward mediocrity. However, by focusing on the poet’s specific decisions, and the effect of those decisions upon a receptive, intelligent reader, the poet can be given useful feedback. This feedback is not so much on what a reader may or may not have liked, but is instead about what is and is not working in relation to the poet’s intent

Check out the entirely of this second untitled poem of By Anna Akhmatova translated by Jane Kenyon… “one memory lies inside me./ I cannot and will not fight against it:/ it is joy and it is pain.// It seems to me that anyone who looks into/ my eyes will notice it immediately”.
It came to my attention via John Baker who interviewed me in 2007 for his ask-author project on how we thought about the process of Creating a text.
In other online poetry finds, this by a local writer who speaks of parenting, expectations of kids and compassionately of parent’s intents: Between the Lines. Woody will be one of the readers at Blog Out Loud live event tomorrow.

Christine de Pizan in The Book of the City of Ladies mentions the story of how Plato died with a book by Sappho under his pillow. Funny to think of who read and was familiar with which people in history.
In the 1400s, de Pizan, also spoke of Proba the Roman (section I.29.1) who knew all of Vergil’s poems (of 70 BCE) by heart and realized she could shuffle them to retell the story of Old and New testaments in a sort of plunder verse.
She recontextualized Vergil’s words so dexterously, as to keep his voice and tone, that he seemed “both a prophet and evangelist” retelling the scriptures.

she would run thru the Eclogue, then the Georgics, and the Aeneid […] in one part she would take several entire verses unchanged and in another borrow small snatches of verse, and through marvelous craftsmanship and conceptual subtlety, she was able to construct entire lines of orderly verse. She would put small pieces together, coupling and joining them, all the while respecting the metrical rules, art and measure in the individual feet, as well as i n the conjoining of verses[…]
This most noble lady wished that this said work, drawn up and composed through her labour, be called the Cento

Cento means patchwork as well as one hundred. A later work of verse, she also entitled Cento, but because it was 100 lines.
Christine de Pizan said Boccaccio related how this woman poet Proba was exceptional. This one work, which others might spend a lifetime on, was for her one of many.

The Poetry Foundation has an app for ipods. I have to say I enjoy having the random anthology at hand.
To navigate you shake the machine and it reels the combination of subject and mood. I like the concept better than being parsed out one feature poem a day. I haven’t had as much luck with Poetry Daily.
Ah, but the makers of Poetry Foundation have a sense of humour. Under a spin that lands on “passion” & “love”, a result of Robbie Burns, “How can I keep my maidenhead”. For those nights that need that special wooing verse. lol.
Also in that spin, A Man’s Requirements by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Again humour. A touch of poetry, a touch of brutal standup smackdown.
Aphorisms and Spells by Alda Merini which has the stanza

I am completely
asexual
not counting errors
and omissions.

To give it another shake is only fair and lands me in “Nature” (subject) & “Optimism” (mood) and e.e. cummings in Just— which gifted the world with “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful”. And lands me at a poems by John Kinsella, Eagle Affirmation,

counteracts
bitterness against all the damage I see and hear
around me on an exclusively crisp blue morning,
when clarity is pain and even one small missing
wattle tree, entirely vanquished since I was last here
at home—I still find this hard to say—is agony;

I’m not sold on the idea of books in a handheld digital device but this is ok.

Lifting text into new context to make a collage that adds up differently by the company its in.

femininity: be responsiveness
phone support has expired
the apple extended plan
can’t be purchased after 5 days
complainers may make valid points
but complaint comes
not about surface happenings —
not saying just to be saying something
— cry, threaten anger, helplessness
with articulacy attached. we’re way past
opportunity’s window when verbal arrives.
blind accommodation might acerbate.
settle? mirror-tone listening, echo?
Feminine vice techniques for MtF:
Do not ‘swallow’ pronouns, articles
or other ‘little words’ at the beginning
or end of sentences.
there need only be one sound.
ripples in every direction denote
the complete story.
Lovelace helped Babbage put his ideas
in writing. She often understood the implications
of his work better than he did, Robinson says.
“Ada recognized that you could actually use numbers
to represent things other than just quantity,” he explains.
“They could represent letters of the alphabet.”
Bechdel Test:
1) at least two women
2. who talk to each other,
3. about something besides a man.
On the Rosenstrasse in 1943, in the center of the century’s greatest cyclone of killing, the violence that could have been visited on protesting German women and on almost 2,000 Jews was neutralized – by a few hundred wives who refused to go home. […] the power they brought to bear […] came first from the essential decision that tens of thousands of them made, to refuse the terms they were offered.
running down like mud
because you fell off your
tricycle?
it becomes self-satirizing.
Christ is simultaneously about to be born, while grieved, while there’s brutality of death and completed act simultaneously. It’s all very Buddhist and postmodern sci-fi. 
it wasn’t for me to interfere with that or step between a person and their god. that’s for others.
There’s the DR-70 blood test that screens for 13 different cancers at the same time. It is highly specific and catches cancer long before you would suspect anything was amiss.
Food Styling for Photographers by Linda Bellingham and Jean Ann Bybee covers the styling bases.
“Oh, you’ve been demoted from
Managing Director to Mail Room Clerk?
Well, you should thank your lucky stars that you still have a job.”
Bullshit.
Nobody ever says, “Oh, you got promoted to Managing Director?
Don’t be happy, just think how much happier Irwin is –
he got promoted to CEO!”
The quiet small things must
be given an equal footing
with louder self-important emotional bits
that jostle and demand attention.
I believe that people should be able to share their life
with whoever they want and the role of government
is to administer that contract that they agree to enter into.[…]
we in government don’t determine the quality or validity
of people’s relationships, said Senator Savino
/how-to-stop-doing-stupid-work/
don’t be an obedient thinker
devalue being called “excitable”
between 2 loves, Bella December?
maybe the tube can be a nausea wallop,
behavior being a familiar stranger,
the guest bed grabbed my best beaver
behind, number 8 becomes tribe
a finite size better be a function, be marked
belligerent because, What is the deep-structure
of what is being said?

Or doesn’t add up at all? Or things really can’t help but mean? What if it doesn’t point enough in one direction and suggests too obliquely?
Is this like taking a professional portrait by someone else and making 3 pieces from it. Some faces cut out in squares arranged like mugshots, some faces cut in sweetheart vignette and displayed in lockets and the original new by what is hacked away? Where is credit due?
What need I footnote to attribute from clipping file? So many pestering questions.
It’s a larger chunk variant of over my dead corpus