Every day is World Poetry Day! Happy World Poetry Day!
And there is no world without poetry, at least not a world worth living in. No, Wallace Stevens, it is everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem, but I’m not sure Stevens said this because most of my books are in boxes, and the internet isn’t helping, of course—it might even be making things worse, if that were possible—but anyway, it, that is, the Stevens quote I’m paraphrasing, or rather, arguing against is probably in his Adagia—a luminous collection of aphorisms, in my recollection—but maybe the quote is a misremembering, dismembering interpolation of a moment in Stevens’s “Certain Phenomena of Sound,” where he recalls the “sound of that slick sonata,” which makes “music seem to be a nature, a place in which itself // Is that which produces everything else…”; and isn’t that one of the things poetry is, that is, does, that is, produce everything else, what’s there and what isn’t, which is to say, there’s poetry to the neuroscientist’s claim that reality is a hallucination, his work suggesting “[w]e are all…trapped in our self-created universes, internal worlds that are all we can ever know, and that will vanish in an instant,” moreover that “one day science might bridge the gulf between our own minds and those of others, so that we can see each other more clearly.” Not new ideas, of course (“life is but a dream,” “I do not know whether I am a person dreaming I am a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a person,” etc.), but it makes me also think of simulation hypothesis, which posits that all of existence is an artificial simulation, even a computer simulation; and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which posits that there are many worlds existing in parallel at the same space and time as our own; all of which is to say, I can’t help thinking how these ideas might not only help us reconsider our perception of reality but how they might expand our imaginations and subsequently vitally alter the art we imagine and create; and I hope they do that for you, too.
In other words, I’m all over the place, which is to say I’m in the world, as it is, as it can be imagined, transformed, renewed.
Anyway, in celebration of World Poetry Day, which is every day, here’s a collection of poetry I’ve published in Big Other.
Will Alexander
From On Solar Physiology
Poetry: Power That Seeps From Invisible Wattage
T. J. Anderson III
Rae Armantrout
Three Poems
Four Poems
Four Poems
Charles Bernstein and Ted Greenwald
Charles Bernstein and Norman Fischer
Erika Bojnowski
Jaswinder Bolina
Daniel Borzutzky
Laynie Browne
Ewa Chrusciel
Selections from Mental Aviary
Five Poems
Laura Cronk
Gillian Cummings
Raymond de Borja
The True Picture of the Past Whizzes By
Nik De Dominic
Shira Dentz
Elaine Equi
Jennifer Firestone
Forrest Gander
Tse Hao Guang
Jefferson Hansen
Jessie Janeshek
Andrew Joron
Michael Joyce
Tom La Farge
Michael Leong
William Lessard
Brendan Lorber
Ten Poems
How a Poem Happens to Happen
Five Poems
Miranda Mellis
Joe Milazzo
Albert Mobilio
Urayoán Noel
Danielle Pafunda
D. A. Powell
Victoria Redel
John Reed
Elizabeth Robinson
Martha Ronk
John Schertzer
Gary Sloboda
Lisa Russ Spaar
Ken Sparling
Stephanie Strickland
Terese Svoboda
Cole Swensen
Arthur Sze
Kailey Tedesco
Edwin Torres
Tony Trigilio
Eight Poems
Nine Poems
Writing What You Don’t Know: Poetry and the Arcane
Joanna C. Valente
G. C. Waldrep
Marjorie Welish
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
John Yau
Micah Zevin
