Month: February 2017

DPF / Faulkner

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For when it’s your birthday, you get to choose a favorite moment of poetic prose and call it, not “purple prose,” but poetry, from The Sound and the Fury.

from The Sound and the Fury: April Eighth 1928 / by William Faulkner

She wore a stiff black straw hat perched upon her turban, and a maroon velvet cape with a border of mangy and anonymous fur above a dress of purple silk, and she stood in the door for awhile with her myriad and sunken face lifted to the weather, and one gaunt hand flac-soled as the belly of a fish, then she moved the cape aside and examined the bosom of her gown.

DPF / Dickinson

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For does grief global, religious, or personal, ever feel lighter than the moment it found you? From Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems.

from Griefs / by Emily Dickinson

I wonder if when years have piled —
Some thousands — on the cause
Of early hurt, if such a lapse
Could give them any pause

DPF / Shakespeare

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For those who believe love speaks for itself and should not be given or taken on demand, from the Folio text, 2008, in The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, Based on the Oxford Edition, 2nd edition.

from King Lear / by William Shakespeare

Cordelia      Nothing, my lord.
Lear           Nothing?
Cordelia        Nothing.
Lear      Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.

DPF / Levis

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For moments which pass so quickly, from The Widening Spell of the Leaves.

from The Spell of the Leaves / by Larry Levis

On Sundays, hiking, the boy finds wildflowers.
They look them up in a field guide before
She places them, like stillness itself, in a vase —

DPF / Valentine

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For seeking life in the middle of everything, from poetryfoundation.org.

from Sanctuary / by Jean Valentine

Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to

follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.

DPF / Antrobus

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For decibels and angels, from Poetry, March 2017.

from Echo / by Raymond Antrobus

And no one knew what I was missing

until a doctor gave me a handful of Legos

and said to put a brick on the table

every time I heard a sound.

After the test I still held enough bricks

in my hand to build a house

and call it my sanctuary

DPF / Frank

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For someone who must have done a perfect rain dance this month, from poetryfoundation.org.

from February Rain / by Florence Kiper Frank

We shall be forever in this room held tight
By the wind and the endless fall of the rain upon snow.
There are tulips upon the window-sill, there is the bright
Gnawing of fire on shadow

DPF / Shakespeare

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For the sonnet which engendered yesterday’s erasure, from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Fourth Edition: 1. 

from Sonnet 97 / by William Shakespeare

And, thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.

DPF / Bervin

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For erasures of Shakespeare’s sonnets, from Nets.

from 97 / by Jen Bervin

the very birds are mute
Or, if they sing
leaves look pale

DPF / Tranströmer

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For music, from The Half-Finished Heaven, translated by Robert Bly.

from Allegro / by Tomas Tranströmer

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;

rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house

but every pane of glass is still whole.