I take great pleasure in pursuing spectacular poems. And given how much poetry is being published at this point, this is not not an easy task. So much good work is being published! So aside from looking for work by the poets I admire, I look for editors with great taste. Or magazines and presses who consistently rely on editors with great taste.
These are some of the poems I’ve found that are spectacular! Or I think they are, at least.
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“Amanuensis,” by Danika Stegeman
In my recent goodreads review of Anthony Madrid’s Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise, I wrote about that moment in poetry workshops where someone comments that the poem could be read as the writer’s ars poetica. And depending on the mood, it can feel like, yeah, thank you for that reasonably dull comment. Or it could be…
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“Ekpyrosis, the Watershed,” by Joe Hall
Ekpyrosis, according to the Internet, is an Ancient Greek term that means “conflagration.” And, according to Google’s number one search result, Plato and the Christian Bible claimed the world would burn during a great apocalypse. It’s important to know this for Joe Hall’s poem, “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed” (from Oversound 9), because it’s not entirely clear…
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“Let Us Mark This Day,” by Sarah Wolfson
I remember in 2008, this poem by Linnea Ogden. “Contact.” Written like it was the poetry that lies beneath legal documentation. Like it was sounding out legalese, writing a poetic consideration of legal discourse. Maybe the “contact” of the title directs readers to think what happens when two kinds of language are put into contact…