new modern and innovative poetry in English

I was apprenticed to the frenzied atmosphere, the verandas that open into dark wind.... Bowen is apprenticed to the... More > “frenzied atmosphere" and in it she finds the crucial minutiae, in it she finds skirts of night and a woman’s heart as a wind-up bird. Bowen’s poetry is where we go to read that heart—as old- time paper valentine and as fist of flesh: valved and valued...letters written with the bones of birds. So it is, so it was that Here, we came for the ghost of the word/ inside the other word: and here, in the bird museum we are haunted by all that is visual as it is visceral and Bowen, playful, brilliant, curator, reminds us that this place is a synaesthete’s playground--where the eye partakes in the delicious but no less-so than the ear, for here: If you listen, you can hear the holes in the alphabet, sounds lit by the lamps of our bones. Like birds we might even rise, our lamp-lit bones: luminous and... fly in a perfect line. Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis < Less

“It’s time to gather rest under duress.” Music and its family of allied arts reigns high in the world Logan Ryan Smith... More > has carved for his Singers. Dance and ritual act as counterforces to the martial law the poem has been written under, in this time of Iraq incursion that touches every aspect of our lives. Smith sends out these poems like bulletins to his heroes, his confreres, his girlfriends, his dead; in the serial form pioneered by Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, Robin Blaser, and Larry Kearney, the tropes rumble like card tricks—Spicer’s forests, diamonds, Giants and knights advance and retreat across a musical chessboard. If there was no one else writing poetry in all of the Bay Area, we would still be “covered”; with Logan Ryan Smith at bat we’ll see angels in the outfield. —Kevin Killian < Less

we are i and my spooky sister. we invade the silence of sounds. he wrote:

i dream every day and, really, they are always... More > beautiful dreams


she dreamt of a road that knows only the horizon. she dreamt of a hug that was hotter than chillies. she dreamt of a ceiling of butterflies.


from The Butterflies and the Burnings < Less

“With its intense subjectivity piercing through to the I that doesn’t say ‘I,’ this sequence is like a Paris winter... More > that finally makes it to March, relaxing sweetly. One is most often you, but “you are sound.” I love the sound of Strata, the movement of reading it, down, across, and through, to return.” -Alice Notley < Less

modern poetry, English

new modern and innovative poetry in English