21st C Spells

Literary Craft Terms: A Reference Glossary for Writers NARRATIVE STRUCTURE & PLOT Arc The shape of a story's movement from beginning to end; the trajectory of change in plot or character. Causality The chain of cause and effect that connects events in a narrative. Climax The moment of highest ten...

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An MIT literature professor discovered that his students were quietly meeting outside class to write verse. @SirJoshBennett on what this means for the future of AI and why poetry matters in a world ruled by tech:

Saul Williams opened his set with a performance of Sha-Clack-Clack at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, Canada on November 21, 2016. He was opening for A...

Poetry performed by Denizen Kane. I found this and just had to share it. http://spoonfedtruth.ucoz.comCopyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyrigh...

Teach This Poem is a weekly series featuring a poem from our online poetry collection, accompanied by interdisciplinary resources and activities designed to help K-12 teachers quickly and easily bring poetry into the classroom. sign up now

I turn that way—I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Vietnam Veterans Memorial Located in Washington D.C., the Memorial is roughly 500 feet wide, and the names of soldiers who died in Vietnam are etched on its black granite walls. I go down the 58,022 names 58,022 names The number of names of…

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

This felt sense at seeing the rose extends, because light in the DNA of my cells receives light frequencies of the flower as a hologram. A moment extends to time passing as sense impression of a rose, including new joys where imagined roses, roses I haven't yet seen or seen in books record as my…

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips. Gotta love us girls, just struttin' down Manhattan streets killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view.

Another dead mare waits    in the shoals of some body    of water, waits to be burden,    borne into a foaming ocean,    where it might become food    for whales, or, simply empty    signifier—hair latched to the sea’s undulation    like Absalom’s beauty    caught in the playful branches    of a…

I like the lady horses best, how they make it all look easy, like running 40 miles per hour is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.

today, i elect jonathan, eleven & already making roads out of water     young genius, blog writer, lil community activist, curls tight     as pinky swears, black as my nation

Oh: I am analytic & 0-1 in a given region (unloved/ labial) and such unlikeness in a most minor foot : signs suggest : an ampersand. Ode to weakness, whatever I am: the situation inside the marriage (phonetic notation). My father came back floral (Augmentations in Audio) and floral is a door.

To have timed your arrow perfectly meant watching the air for a moment seem stitched throughout with a kind of timelessness. To have straddled at last, correctly, the storm of falling in love (and staying there) meant the smell of apples, victory, tangerines, and smoke all mixed together on the…

I will die in Paris with a rainstorm, on a day I already remember, I will die in Paris—and I don't shy away— perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn.        It will be Thursday, because today, Thursday, as I prose these lines, I've put on my humeri in a bad mood,    and, today like never…

All zodiac all radar your voice I carried it across the Atlantic to Barcelona I photographed cathedrals cacti mosaic salamanders I even photo- graphed my lust always your voice skimming a woman’s skin mattress springs so noisy so birdlike you filled her room with cages camera…

What was unforeseen is now a bird orbiting this field. What wasn’t a possibility is present in our arms. It shall be and it begins with you. Our often-misunderstood kind of love deems dangerous. How it frightens and confounds and enrages. How strange, unfamiliar. Our love carries all those and the contrary. It is most incandescent. So, I vow to be brave. Clear a path through jungles of shame and doubt and fear. I’m done with silence. I proclaim. It shall be and it sings from within. Truly we are enraptured With Whitmanesque urge and urgency. I vow to love in all seasons. When you’re summer, I’m watermelon balled up in a sky-blue bowl. When I’m autumn, you’re foliage ablaze in New England. When in winter, I am the tender scarf of warm mercies. When in spring, you are the bourgeoning buds. I vow to love you in all places. High plains, prairies, hills and lowlands. In our dream-laden bed, Cradled in the nest Of your neck. Deep in the plum. It shall be and it flows with you. We’ll leap over the waters and barbaric rooftops. You embrace my resilient metropolis. I adore your nourishing wilderness. I vow to love you in primal ways. I vow to love you in infinite forms. In our separateness and composites. To dust and stars and the ever after. Intrepid travelers, lovers, and family We have arrived. Look. The bird has come home to roost.

Sonnet We sliced the watermelon into smiles. We sliced the watermelon into smiles. We sliced the watermelon into smiles. We sliced the watermelon into smiles. We sliced the watermelon into smiles. We sliced the watermelon into smiles. We sliced the watermelon into smiles. We sliced the water...

Think of their handheld pencil sharpener and its tiny blade.

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.      And he said:      Your children are not your children.      They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.      They come through you but not from you,      And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.      You may give them your love but not your thoughts,      For they have their own thoughts.      You may house their bodies but not their souls,      For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.      You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.      For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.      You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.      The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.      Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;      For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

They came like a dark river — a blur of chest and hoof — everything moving, under, splinter — hooked their horns through the walls. Light hummed the holes like yellow jackets. Mars flew out and broke open or bloomed — how many small red eyes shut in that husk? He reached inside and turned on the…

Your songs are the impossible ruins that keep the hours on turn. Keep awe bare like sound at night. The candle burn. Ice melts and wax. The dirt on your mind. Engines roll in clutter. Clank cool and electrify the room. We always become mysterious— birds at the end of each evening. Whoever does the telling stops time like a crescendo. We hit blue notes so the edges of your honey jars rattle laughter against our teeth. Rhythm breaks like need or the knowledge a mouth organ has about breath and tone, blood and gravity and balance— all those sweet sounds that can make even windows shatter.

My mother is dying of too much electricity on the brain, my father, a limp in his walk, & my macho lost his green card at a bus station. • My macho says: Your skin is the color of milk, you glow between sheets. My father is dying of too much electricity on the brain, my macho, a limp in his walk, &…

these are my people & I find them on the street & shadow through any wild all wild my people my people a dance of strangers in my blood the old woman’s sari dissolving to wind bindi a new moon on her forehead I claim her my kin & sew the star of her to my breast the toddler dangling from stroller…

A boy I did not marry                  taught me to dance salsa on 2      placed the fingers of his left hand            on my untutored spine;               you know what it’s like to become someone’s clave to love for the span           of the trombone’s long breath                  he     …

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;    Where knowledge is free;    Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;    Where words come out from the depth of truth;    Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;    Where the…

The Skyview apartments circa 1973, a boy is kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who (it is important to mention here his skin is brown) prepares his telescope, the weights & rods, to better see the moon. His neighbor (it is important to mention here that she is white) calls the police because she…

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