Sitemap - 2022 - The Sharpener

"this floating world, swept"

Writing Problems: Zombie Poetry!

"The world is gone, I have to carry you"

"the air is alive along it"

"be the body-of-the-one-looked-upon"

"her vigorous soul whizzed free"

"Come to cloud, mind"

Craft: Weldon Kees

"where a dark lake never leaves the air"

"concealed in your face-folds"

"The woods are strange"

"short threads are not enough"

"The Alps neglect their curtains"

"in a heavy light like yellow onions"

"Unknowing I know her, a body on its way to nothing"

Craft: Pier Paolo Pasolini

"into silence falls piecemeal before her"

"driven, desperate to enter the other"

"the very air wincing with light"

"The floating ones"

"flowers of near distances"

Craft: Kenneth Patchen

"I don't have a door"

"without self, without center"

"goes into desire, not past it"

"LOSE AND WASTE NO MORE TIME, POET!"

"the wheel is turn'd"

"And the shaggy green cartilage"

Reading Groups: Lynn Melnick's Refusenik

Reading Groups: Nazim Hikmet's Poems of Nazim Hikmet

Reading Groups: Russell Edson's Little Mr. Prose Poem

Writing Problems: What to do about poetry monsters?

"I'm particularly interested in tasting butterflies"

"like wet dynamite"

"written by God on the skin of a calf"

"the valves of darkness leak"

"Abode in as supreme"

"Could Be Worse!"

Craft: Laura Jensen

"I only borrowed this dust"

"Where the marble is worn away"

"baffle the wind"

"leaping and scarlet into the sea"

"You are mine, my crescent-shaped radiance"

"It never harmed anyone, yet it never helped anyone"

Craft: Russell Edson

The Sharpener: two year anniversary

"True poems flee"

"a fountain lighter than air"

"In the black depths of principle"

"a precocious sound, it is a bite"

"It was also a safe thing"

"As if they could not hoist themselves"

Reading Groups: CM Burroughs's Master Suffering

Reading Groups: Jill Osier's The Solace is Not the Lullaby

Reading Groups: Alice Oswald's Nobody

Craft: In Defense of Chapbooks

"Seasons of our two solitudes"

"the crystal turns to steam and air"

"To imagine other solitudes"

"Still, one must try"

"Uncharted Meter"

"tiny neon lounge"

Craft: Gerald Stern and the Ecstatic

"I want them raucous and want them near"

"Orange bottles scattered around"

"the tight black street becomes unzipped"

"But I want what I am promised"

"wound prove us part"

"Inside the Double World"

"Sometime I think I'll live that way"

Craft: Berl Pomerantz

"full of nails and ghosts"

"While they went seaward to the sea-mouths"

"This brooding yearning heart, that cannot tell itself"

"the lawn moron"

"frontier to our concurrences"

"the main wires are insulate"

Craft: Jack Gilbert

Guided Poetry Reading Groups Winter/Spring 2023

"an old language spoken into the pines"

"To paint snow for earth"

"already tracing a vein to his heart"

"No, it is a statement of joy"

"bits of retrenched nothings"

Craft: Amiri Baraka

"tilting toward the least sound"

Reading Groups: Laura Mullen's Complicated Grief

Reading Groups: Mary Leader's Beyond the Fire

Reading Groups: Camille Guthrie's Diamonds

"the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye"

"To be in any form, what is that?"

"I lay down under language"

"Just by a pulse"

"My words mean only what they say"

Craft: Galina Rymbu

"Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb"

"early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought"

"the shadow that I cast is the shadow that I cast"

"with oily stars sticking"

"clear line, uninterrupted stretch"

"Me into my own spaces"

Craft: Tim Dlugos

"in-wound mid grievous stone"

"Palely and flamily"

"whose eyeballs dart Red fire"

"The night sky was lowing"

"Then sleep takes this away also"

"until I see you correctly"

Craft: Russell Atkins

"the peace was up to me"

"wet from bill to wing"

"glacier-adjacent"

"This is the last place"

"oftener to my hurt no leader at all"

"images of self-confusednesses"

"All that's left is an echo"

Craft: Lynda Hull

"cut, piled and roofed with glitter"

Reading Groups: Szilárd Borbély

"Worn-away wild."

Reading Groups: Chet’la Sebree

Reading Groups: Rachel Mannheimer

"to cover you with froth"

"If the sky lets go someday"

"The dead increase their invisible honey"

Craft: Richard Brautigan

"streak of chaparral across sand"

"stumble, bumble, mistake, fail; yet"

"Two bore, bore what, a mussed ash, ash where there is tin"

"howling in a place"

"fold unfold above river beds"

"changing inside, little and little"

Craft: David Schubert

"While you look, her edges crystallize"

"Caught in the unstopped ear"

"More of a double"

"Honey, let's look at it again"

"The element of folk-time"

"original writer or by some other"

Writing Problems: "Is My Manuscript Good Enough?"

"shimmering harp-runs for the nerves"

"Sweet especial rural scene"

"make me forget the future"

"I am not empty, I am open"

"Only the body eating the body?"

A new Sunday morning reading group

"You resemble that curse"

Guided Poetry Reading Book Groups

"and years of microbits of flora"

Craft: Laura Riding

"A whole spirit pooled"

"tool who only worships space"

"victories with no survivors"

"The rest is the woodpile's reverie"

"howling from the climacteric"

Craft: Kenneth Rexroth

"dryadic, gothic, fanatic against"

"My own glassed stairs, to wind"

"Why are you crying?"

"splendid in your red dress"

"Abomunists reject everything except snowmen"

"Supremely true each to its separate self"

Craft: Rosemary Tonks

"the black river of himself"

"Astral ember"

"One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted"

"super-sensible soap bubbles"

"If I am fernal, it's fern country"

"Death, the birthmark, was growing on all of us"

Craft: Lorine Niedecker

"Soon the sky will leave the river alone"

"The small nouns"

"What is the wind, what is it."

"just enough to clench green"

"the revolt of immense estates"

"on crumbs of shadow"

Writing Problems: Freedom

"moving its char along his tubes"

"swerve away -"

Guided Poetry Reading Group Survey

"is this how it's going to be?"

"Everybody loose and at a distance"

"the myth of originary wholeness"

"B Sharp Blues"

"all dissolved in a moment"

Craft: Ekphrasis

"sealing love to the sharp darkness"

"its lines curve as in mental orrery"

"This mass is his salt"

"at once alive in a blaze of green fire"

"The Palate of the Hate departs -"

"Inebriate of air—am I—"

Craft: Bob Kaufman

"free flight into the worldless"

"A green world"

This Saturday: The Art of Revision

"There is an awful yes in every constitution"

"aware of no thing but art"

"the shape of gone"

"rising to fall, falling to rise"

Craft: Frank O'Hara

"when I flung the glove"

"Men think they are better than grass"

"You will learn toads from diamonds"

"The moon beating its dark bush"

"she is the dark one"

"in black scrolls on the light"

"a summer's wholeness in cathedral gold"

Writing Problems: Four Ways to Make Poetry a Truly Public Good

"Cruel if kind and kind if cruel"

"It pulls the sundown with it"

"it breathes, it circles, a sketch of eternity"

"Sapphire Jelly Island"

"She had tumult of the brain"

"Galleries, run through veins of time"

Craft: Shit Detectors

"Worms are needles at work"

"for the green, grey-green fastnesses"

"(crimson, anxious)"

"Can stones be far behind?"

"In undulating Rooms"

Craft: Arc of Creativity

"hailstones of you and me"

"caw and cry"

"In casual simplicity - invincible little stone -"

"And filter and fiber your blood"

"he is my witness"

"that harsh, irregular flame"

Writing Problems: Voices of Ghosts

"the inmost chamber"

"Sadness tunes the instrument"

"Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet"

"may they bring me precipices"

"a black landscape of need"

"Little violent, diligent seed"

Writing Problems: Be Awake!

"Say peach, say plum, say typical"

"orchard, field and mankind down"

"Cold water business"

"Let me walk through silence"

"announcing itself like something stone"

"daimonion is incantation"

"Pink Gloves"

Writing Problems: Things They Don't Teach you in MFA Programs

"Have we kept anything?"

"I've lost track of who went"

"The blond assassin passes on"

"The crystals show a future with you happening in it"

"how we made the world small"

"Heavy as winter breathing"

Craft: Five Things People Misunderstand about Prose Poems

"I look to you without looking"

"and the salt-tongued air"

"the world, a thousandcrystal"

"you and I, blue glass at the fire-"

"as shadow as promised"

"into the mind's white exile"

Craft: Zbigniew Herbert

"the seer mistaken for the seen"

"The major Voice"

"There is a question left"

"I found my name on every page"

"I'll be me, but I don't like it"

"For its nonmetal yet golden remains"

Writing Problems: Emergent strategy

"their bones in one mad dance"

"echoes of exquies and stones"

"plants we have inside us"

"in a meadow of dust"

"I am out with lanterns"

"you are the one I listen for and to"

"colors arced over a green field"

Writing Problems: Readers as Imagined Others

"substance and increase"

"tasting the hay-flavored air"

"as if a power is finally dominating"

"through the time let the time"

"don't ask don't know"

Craft: Music

"Until the damned maps burn"

"Only that. But that."

"your hand beyond my hand"

"Though by that scathing test"

"wrap-arounds and diatribes"

"a place where the snakes feel safe"

Craft: Breath

"The amaranth moon"

"I'm just like a pile of leaves"

"In a mad orange flare"

"a river's urge to return to the mountain"

"A diadem and curly hair with bits of gold"

"the container cannot contain the thing contained anymore"

Craft: Driver as Metaphor

"you and the night come in"

"No end to the withering of withered flowers"

"The glaze is gone from the bay and the heat lets go"

"lowering amber afternoon"

"Let's spread the greatcoat on the ground"

"Winter-burning in the fields"

Craft: Avoidance

"when the air gushes between mountains"

"one of the wild-blooming crowns"

"potent liquors and water"

"It needs no sugar-painting"

"on the cloudless blue"

"ironed into repose and sweet"

Writing Problems: Anxiety of Allusion

"that all should have their place"

"Oh rain, melt me!"

"Pressed in a secret box"

"Where are the snows of yesteryear?"

"But peers beyond her mesh"

"Here one is clear pine"

"The lonely hut of the horseradish"

Writing Problems: War in Ukraine

"It is otherwise with us"

"drawing that began in the caves"

"the tundra, the sea, the ghetto"

"in my dripping"

"their flesh rich in heavy metals"

"the endearing elegance of female friendship"

Craft: Surprise

"To each I fling a bone"

"the solitude, and the rains, and the road..."

"All that has died germinates"

"Silent we. Resilient we"

"On a bitter, bitter earth"

"within miles of me to melt"

Writing Problems: Reading and Giving

"serenade during a night of an eternal moon"

"Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs"

"And listening to itself with softliest mutter"

"I am green and you are red"

"air was dark. all objects"

Writing Problems: Motivation

"a site in concert"

"jewels on black velvet or apricots on orange"

"How tracelessly it enters"

"Yielded his mind to his heart"

"the ashes of this false catastrophe"

"underneath the earth like an onion"

Craft: Prose Poems

"Let meanings move"

"—while underground"

"Today in the Taxi"

"some dark obedient order"

"You are level, lean, remote"

"in its longing it flies to you"

Craft: What is the function of poetry?

"The poem will be like you"

"staples, in the song"

"Amidst these trees I've invented"

"sooooooo pretty"

"with wing and sweetened fang"

"Swimming through dark, slow"

Writing Problems: Censoring Maus

"Face, blush, breath eyes, evanescent"

"It meant I loved"

"ate a honey and grew waxen"

"fears, stinks, boiling hearts"

"If that be full of meat"

"from all angles"

Writing Problems: Anxiety

"Remember, you naked agent of every nothing"

"there is now is burning dark the only green"

"But you have to feel for it"

"Tilted and stained by wind"

"like spilt dye from a rock"

"Thy nearness our forgiving cure"

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Craft: Humor

"I stand and look at them long and long"

"to accept the absence of One to say it to"

Writing Problems: Clearer and Worse

"your craft shows"

"When mice with wings can wear a human face"

"The lake is an immense cloud"

"The largest Fire ever known"

Writing Problems: Imposter Syndrome

"All the corners that are left"

"the color of the odd hours"

"Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only"

"void where your ears used to be"

"to be part of this loom"

"Wade all life"

Writing Problems: January 6th

"How beautiful yellow is!"