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.
Yesterday was the first day of spring, but here in New York City we didn’t even have a winter, hardly even a sprinkling for the May Queen—that joke going down like a lead zeppelin—but I rang in the season, nevertheless, with a rereading of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, where he writes: “And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed — To the imagination — you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply : To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live, there is but a single force — the imagination.”
Imagine Roberto Matta’s Morphologie de l’ame painting here. Puddles as portals. Grids as rhizomes. Botany as geology and vice versa. See both as and, and, and ad astra. See alchemy, transformation, transubstantiation. See mindscapes coming to life, landscapes coming to mind.
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 all the poetry I’ve published in Big Other.
Julie Agoos
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
Eight Poems
Charles Bernstein and Ted Greenwald
Charles Bernstein and Norman Fischer
Erika Bojnowski
Jaswinder Bolina
Daniel Borzutzky
Poem #1022
Day #1101
How I Wrote Certain of My Books
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
Joey De Jesus
Caridad De La Luz
Shira Dentz
Leisha Douglas
Patrick Durgin
Elaine Equi
Jennifer Firestone
Forrest Gander
Rigoberto González
Tse Hao Guang
Jefferson Hansen
Jessie Janeshek
Andrew Joron
Michael Joyce
Tom La Farge
Ode from a Mockingbird
Two Poems
Michael Leong
From “Disorientations”
More from “Disorientations”
William Lessard
Brendan Lorber
Ten Poems
How a Poem Happens to Happen
Five Poems
Kimberly Lyons
Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Miranda Mellis
Joe Milazzo
Two Poems
Glenn Shadix
Two Poems
Albert Mobilio
Juan J. Morales
Rosalie Morales Kearns
Urayoán Noel
Danielle Pafunda
Willie Perdomo
D. A. Powell
Kathryn Rantala
Victoria Redel
John Reed
Dimitri Reyes
Elizabeth Robinson
Peggy Robles-Alvarado
Martha Ronk
Roberto F. Santiago
John Schertzer
Deema K. Shehabi
Gary Sloboda
Lisa Russ Spaar
Ken Sparling
Stephanie Strickland
Terese Svoboda
Cole Swensen
Arthur Sze
Kailey Tedesco
Edwin Torres
Five Poems
Four Poems
Three Poems
Tony Trigilio
Eight Poems
Nine Poems
Writing What You Don’t Know: Poetry and the Arcane
Joanna C. Valente
G. C. Waldrep
watibirí
Marjorie Welish
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
John Yau
Four Poems
Li Shangyin Enters Manhattan
Micah Zevin
