Sherry Chandler's Blog

Haiku is a poetry form that escapes me.

Even after more than a year of more-or-less continuous practice of writing haiku-like (haiku-ish) micropoetry, I wouldn’t say I hit more than one time in ten producing anything I’d call poetry, let alone a haiku. Though my readers sometimes express appreciation for posts I’d call complete failures.

Which leads me to wonder whether there’s something I just don’t get.

I would quote about the same odds for haiku I read — about one in ten hits, fewer than that...

ursulavernon:

ellenkushner:

shredsandpatches:

junkybowels:

plaidadder:

argonauticae:

argonauticae:

im putting together a couple of scottish folk mixes bc that’s what i do and im honestly curious if anyone in my country has ever been unequivocally happy about anything ever

scottish trad music genres:

Everyone I Love Is Dead
The English Have Stolen All My SheepYou Want To Be My Boyfriend? First You Must Answer These Riddles ThreeThe Protestants Have Stolen All My SheepI Love You A Lot But You’ve Left...

This morning, reading in my journal from 2001, I found I’d copied this line from Mark Jarmen in the American Poetry Review for March/April of that year. The poem is called “Epistle.” According to my journal, Jarmen had six poems in that issue of the APR and each one was titled “Epistle.”

Life enters memory faster every day.

Then I opened up the current issue of The Louisville Review to Bianca Spriggs’s poem “You Can’t Step in the Same River Twice,” which begins

To remember a thing
is to remember...

“I am interested in the relation between information and knowledge, the ways in which experience and experiment might link the two.
We need to be careful not to mistake technology for knowledge.”

- Ann Lauterbach, “Use This Word in a Sentence: Experimental” in By Herself’: Women Reclaim Poetry, ed Molly McQuade (Graywolf, 2000)

“As the values of the free market consume the world economy, as entrepreneurship becomes rampant, as mergers beget mergers like rabbits in Paradise, our cultural institutions appear to be weaker and weaker, less and less willing to embrace work that critiques capital’s hegemonic boondoggle and proposes or poses questions rather than answers. Democracy, needless to say, has become synonymous with capitalism.”

- Ann Lauterbach, “Use This Word in a Sentence: Experimental” in By Herself’: Women R...

<!--[if gte mso 9]>

“We keep asking where they have gone

those years we remember and we

reach for them like hands in the night”

- W. S. Merwin, “To Paula” in Present Company

“What have you done with your years?

You haven’t saved any I see, lighting one

from the end of another like cigarettes.”

- Keith Althaus, “That’s All” in APR 1999

“The English sentence has a habit of constructing positively. In fact, to create negativity in English, we have to invert positive statements … create a ghost of the positive in every negative… The language of “no” mourns what it once had.”

- Molly Peacock, How to Read a Poem

“

Peter, we talk as though

we knew what the years were

that seemed to slip from us

even before

they arrive where have they

gone where were they heading

from the beginning where

did they start from

before there were numbers

”

- W. S. Merwin, “To a Friend Turning Fifty” in Present Company (Copper Canyon, 2005)