Theory: How To Eat a Poem

The Blackberries

On the typographic bushes of the poem down a road leading neither out of things nor to the mind, certain fruits are composed of an agglomeration of spheres plumped with a drop of ink.

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Black, rose, and khaki together on the bunch, they are more like the sight of a rogue family at its different ages than a strong temptation to picking.

In view of the disproportion of seeds to pulp, birds don't think much of them, so little remains once from beak to anus they’ve been traversed.

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But the poet in the course of his professional promenade takes the seed to task: “So,” he tells himself, “the patient efforts of a fragile flower on a rebarbative tangle of brambles are by and large successful. Without much else to recommend them—ripe, indeed they are ripe—done, like my poem.”


-- Francis Ponge





When I think about all the effort I put into writing poems, being a poet, reading contemporary poetry, it just makes me sick. -- An Interview with Daniel Nester

"Luck is the ballgown of the accidental. And the accidental is God's disguise here in the world."(Tamás Jónás)

A tribute to publisher/poet Jonathan Williams



The Poetics of Motherhood




25-title fiction longlist for this year’s Best Translated Book Award





When the winter comes, who will still believe in its cold?

Then through my aunt's yard I'll carry
a bowl holding the steaming
pig's heart over to the pot.
The snow before my steps
lost its whiteness long ago.

There, where the village ends, who does the winter stillness
meet with a precise thrust
and at the little red beech tree
in the rhythm of whose heart
does the peace then fill,
streaming, its vessel?

Orsolya Kalász



Ask a Poet - You Say You Want a Resolution



Metrophobia (otherwise known as the fear of poetry), an American pandemic more tenacious than Swine Flu, is finally on the wane. And not a moment too soon.

That was the time when words were like magic.

The human mind had mysterious powers.

A word spoken by chance

Might have strange consequences.

It would suddenly come alive

And what people wanted to happen could happen

All you had to do was say it.


From: an Inuit poem in How to Eat A Poem