How about be sappy & corny & sad
& awful & pretentious & obvious & dumb.
Because all the best poems
are at least three of these things.
It isn’t that we should quit being sentimental.
It’s that we should get super good at it.
Our hearts are eighteen hungry wolves
that are okay saying things about ‘our hearts.’
— Russ Woods, “Notes to a Young Poet,” from H_NGM_N’s project of the same name
10 notes
18 May 2013
There are no more fathers.
Everyone gets a briefcase
instead, brown leather
with brass locks and three initials
etched into the spot
below the handle. Children spend
their train rides guessing
what the first two stand for.
— Amy David, “Baggage,” published in Full of Crow
10 notes
18 May 2013

Truth to everyone, that’s the new me,

I will call lousy coffee as I sip it
& yes, that dress makes you look fat,

incompetent, even evil in a certain light.

— Amorak Huey, “The Lion Tamer Resolves to Start Telling the Truth,” published in Swarm
37 notes
17 May 2013
17 May 2013
16 May 2013
16 May 2013
I feel when I’m sitting in front of an empty page, part of my problem is I feel like the poem could start anywhere. So there I am sitting in front of an empty page and I feel like the page is almost a symbol of pure potential. I could start with the window or the bird or my feet or my shoes or my socks or my nose, my thumb, anywhere, I could start anywhere. But the minute I put the pencil down on the paper, the minute I start it, then the potential closes down. Then it starts to be about this particular poem. And even though you try to move that poem into a kind of spaciousness, you try to say as much as possible, but even so, it does feel as you’re closing down into this particular poem. And so for me, the experience of writing one poem is saying goodbye to the 999 other poems that want to get written.
— Li-Young Lee, interviewed by Alan Fox for Rattle
16 notes
15 May 2013
Is this normal? I find myself asking about pleasure,
as if I want to break into a consciousness other than my own,
as if I want to be the other in my question and still charge
that I am not enough a part of my senses.
— Tonight’s Cantab feature is local poet and activist April Penn! This is from her poem “Questions About Orgasm,” published in Amethyst Arsenic.
3 notes
15 May 2013
So full of hope I cut my heart into other hearts.
It bled and bled and bled.
Into a buffet of half empty glasses.
Into the velvet lip of night I held myself.
— Lyndsey Cohen, “Of Strings And Of Gold,” published in GlitterPony
14 notes
14 May 2013
Yes, the instruments of my inner life
thumbed along: my xylophone cheekbones,
my bassoon lungs. I was an ensemble of circumstance.
I could pop wide open to scores and scores
of incidental strings. I was flinging notes all over
the neighborhood.
— C. Dylan Bassett, “Some People Are Sleeping and I am Blowing a Trumpet,” published in DMQ Review
13 notes
14 May 2013