"glow through my breastbone"
Pollock, Valentine, Stanford, Tadić, Borbély
James Pollock:
Jean Valentine:
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Frank Stanford:
Novica Tadić (tr. from Serbian by Charles Simic):
Szilard Borbély (tr. from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet):
I cannot no longer bear the intensity/aggressiveness of poetry, and I don’t even want my deeds to be investigated. I would like to be an opened knife, incalculable danger itself, the razor-wielding murderer, so that you can’t even cry out.
Gary Larson:
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Thank you for acknowledging the poetry of Gary Larson!
OMG the things these posts sometimes remind me of. But always: you can write about anything. Any subject. I definitely wrote a poem about a pocket knife years ago, and abandoned it because I thought: who wants to read my thoughts and feelings about a pocket knife? If I recall correctly, the thoughts were about the knife as gender marker, the feelings about the warm communal mood at a party at a restaurant when the lesbian friend of a friend received an engraved pocket knife as a gift. There was some discussion of various genders, bordering on astrology. I felt like leaving the party because I hardly knew anyone and no one would ever give me such a gift. But I stayed and then later wrote that poem and then trashed it. Ah, well.