hell yeah 👍

today is officially the release day for MOUNTEBANK!! I’m so grateful to @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social for publishing this collection and to anyone & everyone who reads it, thank you from the bottom of my heart :) 🎭📚💜

see quoted 🧵 for some poems & art that inspired the book, & 🔗s below to…

Suburban Dusk | Bert Meyers One girl in a red dress leaves the shopping center with empty hands: and you believe in the future—you've seen a drop of blood flee from the luminous cells of a corpse. But the sky slips a coin in the slot between two buildings. Lights go on. Distorted creatures appear. A car, like an angry heart, explodes. And a vast erysipelas spreads over the hills. What can you do? Each night, the city becomes a butterfly, trembling in its oil.

A vivid Bert Meyers piece ("a vast erysipelas").

#smallpoemsunday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social

Poem With Tulips, Bowl, And Frisbee This arrangement. Photos arrive, vanish. The red tulips. Because you looked, collapsed. As if the room collects every word: a blue bowl. Must each word embrace the one before until silence arrives? Its large velvet hands. The street. From here. To the park. The frisbee. The dog. The frisbee soaring out of its plastic halcyon heyday arriving yellow as the sun in summer.

a few years ago in Rust & Moth
rustandmoth.com/work/poem-wi...

#smallpoemsunday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social

The cover of MOUNTEBANK by Tom Snarsky, out March 31st from Broken Sleep Books.

hello everyone! today is #smallpoemsunday and it’s also the first day of March, the month at the end of which my new book MOUNTEBANK will be out from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social :)

each day in March I’m planning to share a #soapboxpoem, a small series of poems(/etc.) named for the origin of the…

the (to me) baffling obsession with replacing ourselves

Last Journal | Charles Wright Out of our own mouths we are sentenced, we who put our trust in visible things. Soon enough we will forget the world. And soon enough the world will forget us. The breath of our lives, passing from this one to that one, Is what the wind says, its single word being the earth’s delight. Lust of the tongue, lust of the eye, out of our own mouths we are sentenced…

Charles Wright

#smallpoemsunday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social

Photo of beach and pools of receding tidal waters, the sun and feathery clouds above.

beach walk and the delicious warmth of the sun in February

In the Grove: The Poet at Ten | Jane Kenyon She lay on her back in the timothy and gazed past the doddering auburn heads of sumac. A cloud—huge, calm, and dignified—covered the sun but did not, could not, put it out. The light surged back again. Nothing could rouse her then from that joy so violent it was hard to distinguish from pain.

Jane Kenyon

#smallpoemsunday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social

THE END OF THE LINE ✦ Todd Dillard In this workshop, we will decouple the idea of a line break from historical influence and intuition, and explore a variety of craft strategies to use when considering how to break a line.

Hi friends! I am hosting a poetry workshop focused on line breaks via ONLY POEMS in TEN DAYS! Check it out! shop.onlypoems.com/products/end...

wander indeed 😀. my pleasure.

Vetiver | John Ashbery Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay, As the flowers recited their lines And pike stirred at the bottom of the pond. The pen was cool to the touch. The staircase swept upward Through fragmented garlands, keeping the melancholy Already distilled in letters of the alphabet. It would be time for winter now, its spun-sugar Palaces and also lines of care At the mouth, pink smudges on the forehead and cheeks, The color once known as "ashes of roses." How many snakes and lizards shed their skins For time to be passing on like this, Sinking deeper in the sand as it wound toward The conclusion. It had all been working so well and now, Well, it just kind of came apart in the hand As a change is voiced, sharp As a fishhook in the throat, and decorative tears flowed Past us into a basin called infinity.

There was no charge for anything, the gates Had been left open intentionally. Don't follow, you can have whatever it is. And in some room someone examines his youth, Finds it dry and hollow, porous to the touch. O keep me with you, unless the outdoors Embraces both of us, unites us, unless The birdcatchers put away their twigs, The fishermen haul in their sleek empty nets And others become part of the immense crowd Around this bonfire, a situation That has come to mean us to us, and the crying In the leaves is saved, the last silver drops.

I often like Ashbery's somewhat longer, more meditative pieces.

"a situation / That has come to mean us to us"

#twopageplustuesday

Uche Nduka A Green Dream Winter frock marigold robe between brownstones where yearning confesses its nature when the mail makes you happy even when this circle begs to be part of a square it’s madness to hate the visitation of grackles

Deep in the cold season - today's PR daily poem.

haha - I seem to learn this over and over again - or a first ending.

a little girl is shoveling snow with a shovel and a bag . Alt: a little child is shoveling snow with a shovel and falls over, only to be righted by their parent.

My new poetry column is up, with a round-up of winter snow poems to consider - featuring poems by Louise Glück, Carl Phillips, @toddedillard.bsky.social, Alex Dimitrov, Emily Dickinson, Joy Harjo & other favorites.

stratfordcrier.com/a-kind-of-sn...

AND YET THE BOOKS And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings, That appeared once, still wet As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn, And, touched, coddled, began to live In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up, Tribes on the march, planets in motion. "We are," they said, even as their pages Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame Licked away their letters. So much more durable Than we are, whose frail warmth Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes. I imagine the earth when I am no more: Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant, Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights. translated by Milosz and Robert Hass

i imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant

- Czeslaw Milosz

Poetry Wet food for adult cats, the stars you can't see, a cup of water after a glass of milk, finding the other glove, decommissioned death ray, calendar with no Tuesdays, the saint's finger bone accidentally transferred to the poorest church, finding something you had lost in the hiding place you were going to use for something else, surprise kheer with plenty of cardamom, a live version of that one song, space dust past our light cone, light touch of the regretful soldier, the many refusals that make us, hovering around the decision like a fly looking to leave and finding only glass, only glass

A prose poem of mine up at Soft Union

#twopageplustuesday

The Sensual World | Louise Glück I call to you across a monstrous river or chasm to caution you, to prepare you. Earth will seduce you, slowly, imperceptibly, subtly, not to say with connivance. I was not prepared: I stood in my grandmother’s kitchen, holding out my glass. Stewed plums, stewed apricots– the juice poured off into the glass of ice. And the water added, patiently, in small increments, the various cousins discriminating, tasting with each addition– aroma of summer fruit, intensity of concentration: the colored liquid turning gradually lighter, more radiant, more light passing through it. Delight, then solace. My grandmother waiting, to see if more was wanted. Solace, then deep immersion. I loved nothing more: deep privacy of the sensual life,

the self disappearing into it or inseparable from it, somehow suspended, floating, its needs fully exposed, awakened, fully alive– Deep immersion, and with it mysterious safety. Far away, the fruit glowing in its glass bowls. Outside the kitchen, the sun setting. I was not prepared: sunset, end of summer. Demonstrations of time as a continuum, as something coming to an end, not a suspension: the senses wouldn’t protect me. I caution you as I was never cautioned: you will never let go, you will never be satiated. You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger. Your body will age, you will continue to need. You will want the earth, then more of the earth– Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond. It is encompassing, it will not minister. Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you, it will not keep you alive.

I think I generally may lack the attention span for longer poems, but, well, Louise Glück -

made me think: maybe poetry doesn’t care if there are people trying to write it or not. a thing apart.

😊

somehow this perfectly describes the holiday season for me 🙏

A poem titled Fairy Tale by Dorothea Grossman

A small poem by
Dorothea Grossman for #smallpoemsunday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social

Nowhere To Hang My Hat Let the day tick—a clock, a string drawn taut beneath a bow. I’ve hauled my husk to the shore of this white, wide page again. Out of the sky, over the lake an airplane falls—small, silver, a samara spiraling into a blue mirror. And tonight, the night will wear your captain’s hat high in the bare-branched maple.

a little poem about (when the tank is utterly dry) attempting a poem...
#smallpoemsunday, @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

Passing Sometimes you called on those you’d never know to come with you in place of those you loved, and talked to them and touched them and let them close purely for sadness, for sadness you’d hold them, and you’d let them go.

for sadness, for sadness

Daniel Halpern

I often think of this poem.

photo of a trail in the woods. a leaning alder. sun through the trees.

sun out in november thus a walk in the woods

I have a new poem in @havehashad.com that answers the burning question of "what is the opposite of an 'eating poems' poem"

"it's all coming up now,
milkweed and mango..."

www.havehashad.com/hadposts/hei...

The Lampshade At the gates of heaven they said let's review: six snails eaten, but no burning buildings entered to save a child, a puppy, a mother's music box. You splashed into a dozen rivers, but many more you saw and never touched, never thought to touch. And yet, you spent most of your life working on this one species of looking. You'd see a wooden door and make a face from its knots and whorls. You'd find a dead cardinal and would wonder if the dead forget the color red first. Mostly we were impressed with this hat you made one night out of a lampshade. Your toddler laughed so hard he nearly lost his voice. After finishing his bedtime, you turned to go, and he told you to stay. We liked how he pulled an imaginary string dangling out of your nose. How you shut your eyes afterwards and lay perfectly motionless beside him. For years your son believed light is something you become. It's waiting, there, under your skin.

NEW POEM ALERT! got a couple new ones in the latest issue of @lamplitmag.bsky.social. Here's the lamp-iest one :)

The Poetry Society was delighted to host Diane Seuss on Monday 10th November for the latest in the prestigious Kenneth Allott / Poetry Society Annual Lecture series

The lecture is now available to view on the Poetry Society's Vimeo channel at vimeo.com/1135802263 or see link in bio