Category Archives: Poet Highlights

How Do We Do It?: Jim Richards’ “Cleave”

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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 »

To Speak the Language of Animals: Marilyn Nielson’s “Sheep”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 38/82: Marilyn Nielson, “Sheep” [audio:http://fireinthepasture.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/tumblr_lx79b4k4DH1qldxkx.mp3](Marilyn’s reading of “Sheep”) To speak for those who otherwise can’t, to give the unvoiced a voice, the other languaged means by which to understand and be understood by others: these seem to be fundamental functions of the gospel of Christ, at the center of which rests the atonement. In this eternally-in-force act… Read more »

The Taste of Gideon Burton’s “Salt and Blood”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 37/82: Gideon Burton, “Salt and Blood” [audio:http://fireinthepasture.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/tumblr_lwm8nxiPnq1qldxkx.mp3] (My reading of “Salt and Blood”) I like the taste of “Salt and Blood.” No, I don’t live in a coven or avoid sunlight and, although I do like potato chips, NaCl isn’t really my thing. Nonetheless, Gideon’s “Salt and Blood” makes my lyric tastebuds tingle. Hence the audio, in… Read more »

She Comes Drenched in Associations: Sara Blaisdell’s “Ophelia”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 36/82: Sara Blaisdell, “Ophelia“ (This links to an earlier version of the poem.) [audio:http://fireinthepasture.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Blaisdell_Ophelia.mp3](My reading of “Ophelia” [the anthologized version]) Sara’s “Ophelia” makes me a bit melancholy. As does the painting upon which I’m pretty sure it’s based (see above). As does Shakespeare’s lady “of ladies most deject and wretched, / That suck’d the honey of [Hamlet’s]… Read more »

The Grace and Restraint of Michael Hicks’ “Family Tree”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 35/82: Michael Hicks, “Family Tree“ [audio:http://fireinthepasture.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Hicks_Family-Tree.mp3] (My reading of “Family Tree”) In “Family Tree,” Michael’s lines are achingly sparse, haiku-like, even. I find in them a seductive grace and restraint that at once fills me and leaves me wanting. Take, for example, his first section, “Adam” (quoted above). As I read it, the sibilance in the first… Read more »

Rhetorics of Grace in Sunni Wilkinson’s “Acrobats”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 34/82: Sunni Brown Wilkinson, “Acrobats” (scroll down) “Acrobats” explores rhetorics of grace. It contrasts the simple and scripted made-for-TV “piety”—an easily imitated and consumed brand commodified and encouraged by the (early morning? early afternoon?) televangelist—with the speaker’s own halting attempts to “awaken [her] faith” to something beyond play-acting, beyond miming the preacher “in front of the mirror.” The… 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 »

“This Was When”: Matthew James Babcock’s “Moose Remembered”

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"Moose in the Neighbor's Yard"

Anthology Poet Highlight 33/82: Matthew James Babcock, “Moose Remembered” (scroll down) [audio: http://www.terrain.org/poetry/25/mp3/Babcock_MooseRemembered_Terrain.org.mp3] (Matthew’s reading of “Moose Remembered” [from Terrain.org]) This poem features a moose, but it’s about memory: the redemption of past experience. “This was when,” the poet begins, speaking to his wife, I presume, about a Saturday morning earlier in their marriage when he, as a young husband… 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 »

On Serrano’s Piss Christ and the Work of Mormon Poetics

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Anthology Poet Highlight 31/82: Tyler Chadwick, “Submerged: Two Variations on Serrano’s Piss Christ“ (on page 72) The central method of gaining knowledge we have is our language. I do not think it is the function of the poets to give us little homilies in it, but to try to work the language to the limits of its resources, because when… Read more »