the eye of Nova's mind

the children of the poor (from "The Womanhood")
by Gwendolyn Brooks

2.

What shall I give my children? who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and not velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying that they are quasi, contraband
Because unfinished, graven by a hand
Less than angelic, admirable or sure.
My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.
But I lack access to my proper stone.
And plenitude of plan shall not suffice
Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone
To ratify my little halves who bear
Across an autumn freezing everywhere.

I Know a Man
by Yehuda Amichai


I know a man
who photographed the view he saw
from the window of the room where he made love
and not the face of the woman he loved there.

At Thirty


Whole years I knew only nights: automats
& damp streets, the Lower East Side steep

with narrow rooms where sleepers turn beneath
alien skies. I ran when doorways spoke

rife with smoke & zippers. But it was only the heart's
racketing flywheel stuttering I want, I want

until exhaustion, until I was a guest in the yoke
of my body by the last margin of land where the river

mingles with the sea & far off daylight whitens,
a rending & yielding I must kneel before, as

barges loose glittering mineral freight
& behind me façades gleam with pigeons

folding iridescent wings. Their voices echo
in my voice naming what is lost, what remains.

Duotrope noted that Left Behind: A Journal of Shock Literature was a new market. I thought I'd check them out. (It's an adult site; be forewarned.)

The poems there are a mixed bag, with wildly varying styles. (There's even a sonnet there!) But, if you make the sojourn (and I would suggest it for one piece in particular), you will probably be amused if not entertained. Even the "gate" cover page is a funny read.

If you decide to enter the site, be sure to check out "On God, Bats and Birds" by Jonas Narbutas, "Discretion: Dialectic: Denial" by Charles Rammelkamp, and especially "Imajism" by 'Ezra Lb'.

Call for Oxford poet to resign after sex row

This scandal is about Ruth Padel but incidentally involves Derek Walcott, a very prominent name in poetry circles.

This article is fairly old news (from May), so I'll search to see if there have been any updates. Ah, yes: Oxford professor of poetry Ruth Padel resigns after smear allegations

Well, I certainly came to the party late. Anyone from the UK who has any more interesting tidbits that may have escaped the international press?

The American poetry community welcomes Kay Ryan as the new Poet Laureate.

The Solitary
by Mary Barnard

The lone drake, upended,
nibbles the pond bottom,
red legs paddling the air.

He sleeps on the rock wall
by the spillway, balanced
on one foot, head hidden.

In the shadowed shallows
under sycamore boughs
the encircling ripples

have one center: himself.
Intruders, including
mallards of his own race,

beautiful strangers, drive
him to frenzied attack,
quacking, snapping, churning

the pond. When they have gone
bright wavelets unbroken
to the rim spread around him.

Right Conduct, by James Tate

A boy and a girl were playing together
when they spotted a woodchuck and started
chasing it. The woodchuck's burrow was at
the edge of the forest and it safely dis-
appeared into it, but the children did not
see this and kept running into the forest.
In no time at all they realized that they
were lost and they sat down and began to cry.
After a while, a man appeared and this fright-
ened them all the more. They had been warned
a thousand times never to talk to strangers.
He assured them that he would not hurt them
and that, in fact, he would lead them back
to their home. They agreed to walk with him,
but when he tried to make conversation they
would not reply. "You act like you're prisoners
of war," he said. "Not much fun for me, but
I guess that's good. When I was a kid my
mother also told me never to talk to strangers.
But I did anyway, because that's how you learn
stuff. I always thought the stuff my ma and
pa tried to teach me was boring. But from
strangers you could learn the secret stuff,
like how to break into a locked door or how
to tame a wild stallion, stuff you could use
in life." It made sense what he was saying,
but the kids were sworn to silence, a brain-
washed silence in a shrunken world from which
they could already faintly hear their mother
scolding them.