Here’s a link to the poem if you’d like to follow along as Neil reads. Read more about the Mormon Poetry Slam here and see the posting schedule here. Vote for your favorite performance here (the link will go live once all the entries have been posted). Use #MormonPoetrySlam if you post about this in your social media circles.
Here’s a link to the poem if you’d like to follow along as Jim reads. Read more about the Mormon Poetry Slam here and see the posting schedule here. Vote for your favorite performance here (the link will go live once all the entries have been posted). Use #MormonPoetrySlam if you post about this in your social media circles.
Here’s a link to Deja’s poem if you’d like to follow along as Dayna reads. Read more about the Mormon Poetry Slam here and see the posting schedule here. Vote for your favorite performance here (the link will go live once all the entries have been posted). Use #MormonPoetrySlam if you post about this in your social media circles.
Read more about the Mormon Poetry Slam here and see the posting schedule here. Vote for your favorite performance here (the link will go live once all the entries have been posted). Use #MormonPoetrySlam if you post about this in your social media circles.
Anthology Poet Highlight 41/82: Paul Swenson, “Negative Space” [audio: http://fireinthepasture.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Swenson_Negative-Space.mp3] (My reading of “Negative Space”) On the afternoon of the first resurrection, I want to sit on my sister May’s bench and read her new poems. So, maybe, if you’re still around when I go under, I wonder—could you burn me, turn me into ash, and slip me in [the… Read more »
Anthology Poet Highlight 39/82: Jim Richards, “Cleave” [audio: http://fireinthepasture.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/tumblr_lxc4b0b5581qldxkx.mp3] (My reading of “Cleave”) I take Jim’s “it” to be, yes, sex—but also more than sex. It take it to be the much deeper state of being, the more-than-intimate connection, the dual state of oneness entered into when partners become more than lovers, lovers more than partners. Such eroticism goes much… Read more »
Anthology Poet Highlight 30/82: Elaine Wright Christensen, “Sermon On Manchac Swamp” Ah, “[t]he world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; / It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed.” So Hopkins, for whom “nature is never spent.” For whom creation is a living fountain of… Read more »
Anthology Poet Highlight 28/82: Danny Nelson, “Creation” Danny’s “Creation” revises the Old Testament’s opening text. As such, it delves deeply into the “procreant urge of creation,” a phrase straight out of Whitman. Indeed, in Danny’s poem, as in Whitman and, I would argue, most poetry, I find this “Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the… Read more »
Anthology Poet Highlight 26/82: Will Bishop, “When I Do Go On My Honeymoon” Afraid but not afraid to let her touch me, we’ll undress slowly like passing the sacrament … Will captures the thrill—and the anxiety—of embarking on a (pro)creative journey in this poem. He begins by engaging a paradox experienced by unsuspecting virgins when they sexually collide atop the… Read more »
Poet Highlight: Emily Stanfill, “Then I Became Eve“ What strikes me most about the poem, first, is the way the poet “verbs” the adjective innocent, using it not to describe her Eve—as in, “I am/was innocent/an innocent person”—but as a means of modifying her, as in, “He made me innocent.” This out-of-the-ordinary usage highlights, for me, the possibility of Adam… Read more »