Tag Archives: community

Public Uses of Poetry: Two AML Proposals

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I submitted two proposals for this year’s AML Conference, both poetry-centered, of course. Here they are: Proposal 1: Live Poetry Anthology: Mormon Poets Read (Two full sessions) Based on the success of the two poetry reading panels I organized for last year’s AML Conference, I approached my poet friends to see if there was any interest in organizing more readings… Read more »

Disturbing the Dust on Emma Lou Thayne’s Jar of Rose Hips

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Poet Highlight: Emma Lou Thayne, “The Rose Jar“ Disturbing the dust on a bowl on rose leaves . . . –T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton“ In the opening section of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” the poet muses on the interconnections and “unredeemab[ility]” of time (line 5): “What might have been,” he says, “is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual… Read more »

Airing the Cultural Laundry: Laura Baxter’s “Take Care of Your Soul—It’s Flapping in the Breeze”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 32/82: Laura Nielson Baxter, “Take Care of Your Soul—It’s Flapping in the Breeze“ “Take Care” is an exercise in absurdity. I mean, a neighbor airing his soul on a clothesline like recently washed laundry then leaving it to dry for a few decades? How absurd! But this premise hasn’t been pushed to absurdity just for absurdity’s sake. This… Read more »

“Not Satisfaction, but Its Proxies”: Javen Tanner’s Curses For Your Sake

Anthology Poet Highlight 10/82: Javen Tanner, Curses For Your Sake “The title of Tanner’s chapbook frames well the experience captured in his lyric narrative poems. Extracted from the decree God directed towards Adam and Eve at the moment he expelled them from the Garden of Eden, the phrase ‘curses for your sake’ (see Gen. 3:17) suggests that moral paradox and… Read more »

The Deep-throated Ache of Marilyn Bushman Carlton’s “Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major

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Anthology Poet Highlight 5/82: Marilyn Bushman-Carlton, “Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major“ (Here’s a link to my reading of Marilyn’s poem.) Music, as poetry, has power to bind us through and with the body’s rhythms. Marilyn Bushman-Carlton provides a case in point with “Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major,” a fairly short poem that shows the… Read more »