Because You Asked about the Line
Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov
from “Sentences”
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
He introduced himself as “Crazy Ali”, and he wasn’t thinking about selling something to us. He wanted to share. Crazy Ali, The Turkish Poet (Photo by Marcelline Burns) I asked, “Who gave you that name?” to which he responded with obvious pride, “I gave it to myself more than a quarter century ago. I am…
Further confusing Grace, it was Trumpeter who twice tried to step the group down from his minute of turbulence. Maybe the imp had tapped his forehead, too. On the bridge—she drove ten miles per hour but there was no long delay—he told, in flat tones, the story of a Catskill Mountains meditation trip he had…
Early in the Morning Li-Young Lee from Rose While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced for breakfast, before the birds, my mother glides an ivory comb through her hair, heavy and black as calligrapher’s ink. She sits at the foot…
“S” IS FOR SILENCE (Kinsey Millhone Mysteries) by Sue Grafton. Okay. So Milhone lives in the 1980s. But the cold case she is working on–and that she draws her alternative point of views from–is set in the 1950s. And, boy does Grafton ever nail the 1950s, when TV was just set to burst into our…
I’ve been thinking of Pablo Neruda recently for a surprising reason. I’m going the Greece. I have this dreamy idea of Greece as a land of lovers and poets. I recalled one of my favorite movies which formed my dreamy image: Il Postino (The Postman), a 1994 Italian language film directed by Michael Radford, It…
When Mary Oliver read in St. Louis at Art & Soul Cafe, Christ Church Cathedral in December 8th at 1210 Locust Street, downtown, a group of 200 hushed Mary Oliver fans gathered to hear her read. It was thrilling to be in her presence and in the assembly of her devotees. —JGR PRAYING by Mary…