Lola Ridge:
Emily Dickinson:
Opon what brittle / Piers - / Our Faith doth / daily tread - / No Bridge below / doth totter so / and Yet - none hath such / a Crowd - / It is as old as / God - / Indeed - 'twas built / by him - / He sent his son / to test the Plank / And he pronounced / it firm -
Octavio Paz (tr. from Spanish by Eliot Weinberger):
The Sharpener is a reader-supported newsletter. If you get value from these newsletters and want to support my work I encourage you to take out a paid subscription.
Christopher Gilbert:
Hart Crane:
Sonny Rollins, “The Bridge,” rec. 1962:
About Sean Singer
Sean Singer Editorial Services
Subscribe to The Sharpener
The paid-subscriber version of The Sharpener includes weekly installments of craft pieces, approaches to writing problems, topics in contemporary publishing for writers, and biographical features on poets I consider important.
I love Paz’s “Between now and now” as marking time differences in reading the words. After the focus on sequential time, the poem moves toward internal and then external spaces of time. I love the sequential and non-sequential spaces of time represented in both internal and external states.