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When I can’t sleep – when I’m sick – when no one else is home – when I’m lost in transit – I tinker

This is my word for what I do – a slow – un-clever – tactile – cheap – harmless rearranging of odd bits of my nature & gatherings – until they sing – off-key

I tinker at long sequences – & stay close to notebooks – mostly when no one is looking

Am increasingly filled with hopelessness – but sometimes when I’m up to my elbows in a line’s perplexities

Confidence lands its flocks upon me & I feel – inside the poem – unafraid

Notes on the Poem
Phil Hall examines the poetic process in a very personal way in this fragment from the long essay-poem sequence "A Thin Plea" from his collection "Killdeer." Within a few deceptively simple lines, he covers the mental and emotional cycle from uncertainty to quiet triumph in creating a work of art.

Hall is succinct but intimate as he confesses to insomnia, illness, loneliness and being disoriented. He offers his coping mechanism, the humble practice of what he calls tinkering. It's all very self-effacing, because we know that the "odd bits of my nature & gatherings" he is tinkering with are the words, phrases, images and themes that form his powerful, memorable poetry. We know those poems sing very much on key and very true.

With his modest description, Hall makes the artistic process very approachable, even as he suggests that he engages it "mostly when no one is looking." By connecting it to moments and feelings we've all had, but perhaps don't always admit to or acknowledge, Hall makes what is singular about his own personal artistic process into a shared, accessible experience.

The last line of this sequence is striking in contrast to the images of vulnerability, furtiveness, doubt that lead up to it. The sweep of a winged flock is majestic and exultant. Hall feels "unafraid" inside the poem that is now falling into place for him. It gives the reader of the poem - perhaps an aspiring poet him or herself - the hope of that same feeling of safety and confidence.

Cargo has let down
her hair a little and stopped pushing
Pliny the Elder on

the volunteer labour
During summer it was all Pliny the Elder,
Pliny the Elder, Pliny

the – she’d cease only
for scotch thistle, stale Cheerios, or to reflect
flitty cabbage moths

back at themselves
from the wet river-stone of her good eye. Odin,
as you already know,

was birthed under
the yew tree back in May, and has made
friends with a crow

who perches between
his trumpet-lily ears like bad language he’s not
meant to hear. His mother

Anu, the jennet with
soft hooves of Killaloe, is healthy and never
far from Loki or Odin.

The perimeter fence,
the ID chips like functional cysts slipped
under the skin, the trompe

l’oeil plough and furrowed
field, the UNHCR feed bag and visiting
hours. These things done

for stateless donkeys,
mules, and hinnies – done in love, in lieu of claims
to purpose or rights –

are done with your
generous help. In your names. Enjoy the photo.
Have a safe winter

outside the enclosure

Notes on the Poem
What inspires an artist to create has always been a source of speculation and wonderment for those not so gifted or inclined, but grateful for those fruits of artistic inspiration. You name it, and someone has probably painted a picture, penned a song, crafted a poem, or birthed some work of incredible art sparked by clear, sometimes surprising, sometimes unlikely and sometimes obscure sources of inspiration. Ken Babstock's "Autumn News from the Donkey Sanctuary" boasts an unusual poetic muse that is one of the poem's singular delights.

Babstock shares in an interview how he learned about the donkey sanctuary and its newsletter. Descriptions and names from the newsletter are the starting point for Babstock to progress through the possible characters of and interactions among the scarred, "stateless" but gentle and gently healing donkeys, to a suggestion that how they are subsisting, surviving and thriving offers lessons for us all.

Babstock's poem presciently complements a brief reflection on the donkey sanctuary web site about anthromorphism. Attributing human characteristics, reactions or behaviour to non-human entities, including animals, is inaccurate, potentially troublesome, maybe presumptuous ... but also tempting, comforting and even instructive at times, as both the donkey sanctuary correspondent and Babstock suggest. We don't know for certain if Cargo has really "let down / her hair a little", but if she seems more relaxed and not going on about whatever (Pliny the Elder as likely as anything), we could all stand to follow her example, stop and enjoy our stale Cheerios too. We also don't know if Odin and the crow are friends or the crow is tormenting him, but we can all learn and benefit from relationships outside our immediate circles.

Inspiration doesn't have to be lofty or conventionally beautiful to potently inform an artistic creation. What are the most unusual sources you've seen most skillfully and memorably woven into poetic form?

Fallen
angels

look like
flakes of soot
abacuses
cabbage leaves
stuffed with black rice
hail
painted red
blue flames
with yellow tongues

fallen angels
look like
ants
moons wedged beneath
the green fingernails of the dead

angels in heaven
look like the inner thighs
of an underage girl

like stars
they shine in shameful places
they are pure like triangles and circles
with silence
inside them

fallen angels
are like the open windows of a morgue
like cows’ eyes
like the skeletons of birds
like falling planes
like flies on the lungs of fallen soldiers
like streaks of autumn rain
connecting lips with birds taking flight

over a woman’s palm
wander
a million angels

devoid of belly buttons
they type on sewing machines
long poems in the shape
of a white sail

their bodies can be grafted
onto the trunk of an olive tree

they sleep on ceilings
falling drop by drop

Notes on the Poem
The judges' citation for Sobbing Superpowers: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Rozewicz notes how Rozewicz's work, deftly and deferentially translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak, takes on grand themes but uses plain speech to examine them. "Homework Assignment on the Subject of Angels" is a striking example of this approach, as Rozewicz takes on and Trzeciak interprets in English the multiplicity of meanings of the sacred symbol of angels.

Rozewicz deconstructs the symbol of the angel - an idealized being and a messenger from God with an equivalent in many religious and spiritual traditions - by associating it and its "fallen" counterpart with numbers of simple and vivid images. While simple, though, some of the images are difficult to align, even nonsensical. If the angel and the fallen angel are delineated as the embodiments respectively of good and evil, or the failure of goodness, why aren't the images associated with each also obviously denoting or connoting good or evil? For example, why is a fallen angel like an abacus? what are the negative connotations, if any, with being compared to "streaks of autumn rain" or "birds taking flight?" While equating an angel with the purity of a young girl might make sense, equating an angel with the anatomy of a girl described with a more pointed adjective is troubling.

In keeping it simple to the point of terse, Rozewicz the poet and Trzeciak the translator powerfully call into question, even subvert the symbols. While contemplating something truly immense, they still modestly categorize the exercise as a "homework assignment." The symbols are viewed freshly and anew. With clear language and images, it's revelatory to discover the surprisingly blurred lines between good and evil.

I remember the girl leaning down from the sunlight
To greet me. I could have been anyone. She could not:
She was Josie, remember, and smiling – she knew me already –
Auburn gate-girl to the garden-world,
To the lilacs and pears, the first summer
Seen perfectly once, then never again. And she left.
The garden – the garden, of course, has gone under the stone
And I cannot complain, a half-century gone
Like the cherry tree weeping its resin,
The dry grass, the slab of white marble
The butcher propped up in the back yard to sit on –
Things of the world that the world has no need of,
No more than of Josie or me or that morning.
Still a child as I see now, she leaned down
To smile as she reached out her brown hands to greet me
As though this were how these matters must be
And would be forever amen. She was saying goodbye.
And I cannot complain. What is under the stone
Must belong there, and no voice returns,
Not mine and not hers, though I’m speaking her name.

Notes on the Poem
Wielded as a poetic device, repetition can achieve any number of powerful and pervasive impressions. Sean O'Brien uses that device sparingly in the poem "Josie", to subtle and moving effect.

Repeating a sound, word, phrase, fragment, line, stanza, or some other pattern or element within a poem can have subliminal, sensory, emotional and other types of impact. The frequency and form of repetition either intensifies or more carefully interweaves the effect in the poem, which can be stirring, pleasurable, maybe provoking. Poetic repetition at its best, however overt or suggestive, is always memorable.

In Sean O'Brien's wistful remembrance of a girl named Josie, he repeats two phrases: "I cannot complain" and "under the stone". He only repeats each of them once. The contexts in which the phrases are used are very different. The passages of time and circumstance between the two instances is both vast and intimate. The minimal but telling use of repetition strikes a profound and touching chord.

Glowing images in this poem also help to build its sense of nostalgia. The simplicity of the words and phrasing underscore the poem's quiet, noble, understated yearning. The echo of those two phrases frames it all poignantly.

These frantic blooms can hold their own
when it comes to metaphor & God.
Take any name or shade of irony, any flowery
indifference or stolen gratitude, & our eyes,
good or bad, still run up to this hue.
Take this woman sitting beside me,

a descendant of Hungarian Gypsies
born to teach horses to dance & eat sugar
from her hand, does she know beauty
couldn’t have protected her, that a poppy
tucked in her hair couldn’t have saved her
from those German storm troopers?

This frightens me. I see eyes peeping
through narrow slats of cattle cars
hurrying toward forever. I see “Jude”
& “Star of David” scribbled across a depot,
but she says, That’s the name of a soccer team,
baby. Red climbs the hills & descends,

hurrying out to the edge of a perfect view,
& then another, between white & violet.
It is a skirt or cape flung to the ground.
It is old denial worked into the soil.
It is a hungry new vanity that rises
& then runs up to our bleating train.

I am a black man, a poet, a bohemian,
& there isn’t a road my mind doesn’t travel.
I also have my cheap, one-way ticket
to Auschwitz & know of no street or footpath
death hasn’t taken. The poppies rush ahead,
up to a cardinal singing on barbed wire.

Notes on the Poem
Colour can be a potent symbolic or sensory component of the most memorable and affecting poetry. Colour associated with specific objects or beings can add layers of meaning that can in turn produce rich emotional resonances. However, if layered on too thickly, that deluge of highly charged colour can intimidate, overpower, muddy the intent of a piece. Yusef Komunyakaa uses colour and vividly coloured entities sparingly and, as a result, powerfully in this selection from his collection The Chameleon Couch.

Not only does Komunyakaa use colour carefully in "Poppies," but he pragmatically hastens to deconstruct the usual associations with the colour and the internationally significant symbol of the flower by tackling it in the opening lines of the poem:

These frantic blooms can hold their own
when it comes to metaphor & God.

While going on to grant that we'll still react to "this hue" regardless, he moves on to place the flower in the hair of a women under threat. Not only is the placement of the flower not expected - we think of it pinned solemnly to coats and lapels - but its seeming potency is immediately defused, as it doesn't save her.

Komunyakaa moves swiftly from historical but still pervasive memories of horror to more recent and personal concerns and challenges, relating quite literally to colour. The red morphs from poppies to a cardinal - vibrant, passionate, singing defiantly, as vividly symbolizing life as well as death. The blazing red frames and continues to inflame an unflinchingly provocative poem.