Arts
A collection of 297 articles.
The Poetry of Ma Dai
Gowpen & Undertow
Paper Birds at the Crosswalk
Equilibrio Instabile
Observance
Swimming
Leadore
The Word Made Flesh
With Every Classmate I’ve Lost, I Feel like I’ve Failed a Test
Inflection Point
Here To There
A Conversation with Salvator Rosa
The Poet as Thief
“Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu.” — Arthur Rimbaud Was Prometheus a poet? Rimbaud says he was, stealing fire from the gods: technology, knowledge, human arts and sciences. He paid a terrible price for his audacity. Whatever was he thinking? Look what we have done with what he gave
Three States Triptych
The 7th Burial Mound
The Forty-Ninth Year
Unraveling
Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life)
Live from the Hadal Zone
Grace
Animal Instinct
Today a Cooper’s Hawk perched itself outside our bedroom window on a low branch of a small tree not twenty feet away. The courtyard of our condo complex. Frequented by all sorts of wildlife: sparrows and wrens, mourning doves, juncos, hummingbirds, now and then a cardinal, chipmunks, rabbits, lots
Wonder Me
Orchard Season
Pray Silence (The Mind of the Meeting)
Three Elegies for the Everyday
FLATLAND
In the Valles Caldera
Bubble of Loneliness
Ancient Cooperation
Easter Plum
Pistachios
Ars Poetica: or, Benzaitan’s Rules for Poems (That She Told Me In A Dream)
Dream Person
The Morning News
Heat of a Bayou
Dämmerschlaf, or, Twilight Sleep
What You Could Not Spare
Emergency Room
Not Quite Touching Sestos
A Silencing
Crepe Myrtles
Deny Your Surface Self
Văcărești
I Wake Up Daily Which Cannot Continue Forever.
How to Write a Poem
While We Were in Motion
Exit Terra
Porschegasbord
In Search of Dreams
At the Cardiologist’s
Mystifying Answers to Magic 8 Ball Questions Regarding Recent Political Events
Bad Angel's Home
Solaria
An Alternate Ending
Gilgandra, 1963
Words Unheard
Summer in the Mountains
Haberdasher
Mother-in-Law
Stealing Baby Jesus
The headline in today’s Inquirer shocked me to my very soul: “Baby Jesus Stolen from the Shrine of St. John Neumann,” Northern Liberties neighborhood, Fifth Street & Girard. In broad daylight, too. Okay, it was only a plaster figurine, not expensive, though very much beloved— according to the shrine’
Ice Skating on Lake Estancia
Shahuhude (Foolish)
The Teacher Retires
A Manifesto Against Manifestos
Johnny Payne questions the idea of manifestos in poetry, preferring his own mantra: “Write poetry first with the ear, second with the eye, third with the mind.”
The Sound of Silence
Like a Rock
Cheers
"God could be shaking a cocktail for me and I’d still/have a complaint."
The Endless Vitality of "Ode to the West Wind"
Merion West arts editor Johnny Payne reflects on why Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” endures over the centuries as one of the finest works written in English.
At Woodlawn
Three Haiku
The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride
The Discarded
Villanelle for Stronghold Table and Daydream
“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”
Indigo Goodbyes
“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”
Fieldnotes: Annie Christain’s “The Vanguards of Holography” and Caroline Harper New’s “A History of Half-Birds”
“There is a sense of preparation through formal and informal erudition, meant to complicate what it means to write adequately about natural and human worlds, with fewer donnéees and more of a sense of a non-human cosmos, one of manatees and marsupials, in which each creature’s essence is not given t
The Ficus Frost
“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”
Melodic Dream of Attic
“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”
A Chapel
“Yet these walls sound with echoes of the past,/With whispered prayers which linger in the air/And animate this space – still holding fast:/A shelter from the passing world’s despair.”
Strawberry Fields Forever: Amie Whittemore’s “Nest of Matches”
“Lilies/finch/flinches/nest/basil/hair/hat. I would swear before a jury that those are all legitimate off-rhymes, even if I were convicted of perjury for it. I wish that Shelley or Keats or Lorca or Miguel Hernández were alive so that I could pass this poem along to them.”
The Incorporated Town and Cold War Clocks
“The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.”
Public Education
“No one assigns homework./No one expects anyone to do anything./Disappoint, like ill-fitting pants,/can chafe you to death.”
Daisy Chain
“Astrology is not a science because women conceived it/and it’s not a religion because the stars, even/with the pictures they pattern,/could never take the place of a god”
Cosmic Comic Kvetching in Anthony Immergluck’s “The Worried Well”
“The grand Guignol exaggeration provides an excellent comic read, as we fail to take completely seriously his worrywart grandstanding. Chances are, we have known someone exactly like him, who upon greeting us, got straight to describing their various medical conditions, real and imagined in excrucia
Overpass to Memphis
“This insufficient code of the soil—/aphasia’s shorthand where/language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms”
The Bells, on Evening Paths
“The tower tall strikes bells. The day slinks out/Leaving behind skies watercolor clear/And gives the evening air the taste of song”
Perfect Paradox
“the idiosyncrasies, stamps of my proprietorship”
The Worst of Our Fathers
“we struck/each other so often, too often,/like astronauts/scraping for the last flight/back to earth”
My Best Friend’s Sugar Daddy
“waxen winter plants, an oil portrait of a stillborn son,/sensory deprivation tank”
Midwestern Mice in Silk Kimonos: Yuki Tanaka’s “Chronicle of Drifting”
“[Yuki] Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premis
Miscalculated
“For this, we built a star-searcher/and launched it/into the galaxies:/Mirror upon giant mirror/sifting through time”
Observance, 2022
“Someone recently fell/into an industrial mixer at the latter’s factory./The company sent bread/from the same facility to her funeral.”
Saints
“What kind of light flames on them? What’s on fire—/A church? A shop? But also inward: desire”
Language for Throat and Tongue: Elise Paschen’s “Blood Wolf Moon”
“[Elise] Paschen’s writing give new meaning to the term ‘ethnopoetics,’ taking it outside the boundaries of ‘traditional societies,’ ‘the informant,’ and the outsider who goes in to record ‘pre-literate narratives.’”
Night Stalkers
I Thought I’d Live ‘til Ninety-five
“I envisioned myself old on a mountain hike/a soft breeze lifting my long white hair/I thought I’d live ‘til ninety-five”
Asterisk*
“Sinister pinwheel/stuck to a breezeless sentence/as sly ornament—”
The Wake
“I swore I heard willows cry/through the zig zagged fields,/traveling through my universe/as quickly as the moon touches our light”
Haunted by the Sonnet: Erica Reid’s “Ghost Man on Second”
“In [Erica] Reid’s Ghost Man on Second, the real ghost man floating through the pages is the sonnet.”
Moth
“The city never sleeps: the isle of faces illuminated by cell phones/is proof its waking isn’t rising, only beeping, only static,/only the cashier in the convenience store, only flickering.”
Nostalgia
the gilded tree that glitters in dusklight/like an upside-down chandelier