Landscape Myopia - Lindsey Alexander (From Rodeo in Reverse)

The panoramic view—I am a part
of each scene too, but I can’t stand back far
enough to get it

down or take it in. Closer, easier, a snowy egret tips its hat
to me, proverbially. My epiphany?
My periphery and blind spot—the fly-away blur, the not-quite end.

Afterlife - Rachael Boast

Afterlife

Late nights like unopened letters

the fold coming unstuck

from this one in the moist air

the message made prescient

by the way in which a wave

lifting from the surface of itself

could be lifted further

enough to reach into it and grasp

from under its erratic stars

the unwritten hour before dawn

Void Studies. Picador, 2016.

A poem by Danez Smith

Topography - Sharon Olds

Derek Mahon poem

David Harsent - Icefield

Save as Draft - Joel M. Toledo

Or write as poem. The whole point is often
what we miss out on. To revise is to reconsider
the experience of, say, a leaf - never mind
that is not green anymore. Or, pardon the sudden
evening. The transition was nice enough;
the explosive colors of dusk. And, didn't you feel
so much sadness? I cannot explain it any better
than how I could when the outlines were still there:
tress and some wonderful new shapes. 
Since then, things have changed. A pale hand
moves in the darkness. And someone is calling out,
come to bed, come to bed. And it is just you.
The evening insists on evening. It is that simple. 
It is late enough as it is.

Retirado daqui: http://www.softblow.org/toledo.html

The Roses - Katherine Towers

Because my father will not stand again
beneath these swags of Himalayan Musk
nor stare for hours to see which stems are safe

and which need tying back, I have it in my mind
to let the roses pull our house down slowly
for a hundred years. Then I’ll come back

to find its wreck of thorns and brick, my father
lying on the bed in which he died
and blinking in the petal-scented light.

The Remedies. Katherine Towers. Picador, 2016.

How to draw a perfect circle - Terrance Hayes

I can imitate the spheres of the model’s body, her head,

Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbow

But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral

From her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle,

The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils

And any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle

Is a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circles

Rests in the serpent’s gaze the way my gaze rests on the model.

In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject

Without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected

By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake

Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself,

A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman.

To draw the model’s nipples I have to let myself be carried away.

I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves

As there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teeth

In the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her 
wedding,

The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel.

The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing,

In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows,

But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy.

When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face

And the cop, bleeding from his eye, kills the assailant, no one traveling

To the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone 
witness.

The scene must be carried on the tongue, it must be carried

On the news into the future where it will distract the eyes working

Lines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me.

At the center of God looms an O, the devil believes justice is shaped

Like a zero, a militant helmet or war drum, a fist or gun barrel,

A barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a field

The lifter bends like a broken O. The weight of the body

Lowered into a hole can make anyone say Oh: the onlookers,

The mother, the brothers and sisters. Omen begins with an O.

When I looked into my past I saw the boy I had not seen in years

Do a standing backflip so daring the onlookers called him crazy.

I did not see a moon as white as an onion but I saw a paper plate

Upon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat.

An assailant is a man with history. His mother struggles

To cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral.

The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced, a volatile gas stings

The slicer’s eyes like a punishment clouding them until they see

What someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees:

A soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat.

The onion is pungent, its scent infects the air with sadness,

All the pallbearers smell it. The mourners watch each other,

They watch the pastor’s ambivalence, they wait for the doors to open,

They wait for the appearance of the wounded one-eyed victim

And his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant’s funeral

Appeasement. Before that day the officer had never fired his gun

In the line of duty. He was chatting with a cabdriver

Beneath the tracks when my cousin circled him holding a knife.

The wound caused no brain damage though his eyeball was severed.

I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps. In the Odyssey

Pink water descends the Cyclops’s cratered face after Odysseus

Drives a burning log into it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could

Begin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased,

Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazy

I am afraid I will walk the streets naked, I am afraid I will shout

Every fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me, I will try to murder

Or make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me.

Though the bullet exits a perfect hole it does not leave perfect holes

In the body. A wound is a cell and portal. Without it the blood runs

With no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops

Shaped like the symbol for infinity, from the Latin infinitas

Meaning unboundedness. The way you get to anything

Is context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subject

A disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist’s eye

Begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops,

A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion

Could fit into it. Separated from the body the eye begins

Its own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests,

When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed

It becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell,

Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the model

Pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them

As one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myself

In the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell

Or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips.

You must look without looking to make the perfect circle.

The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid

Until the drawing is complete.

Charles Simic

A poem by Kate Tempest

In the old days
The myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves.
But how can we explain the way we hate ourselves,
the things we've made ourselves into, 
the way we break ourselves in two,
the way we overcomplicate ourselves?

But we are still mythical.
We are still permanently trapped somewhere between the
      heroic and the pitiful.
We are still godly;
that's what makes us so monstrous.
But it feels like we've forgotten we're much more than the 
       sum of all
the things that belong to us.

The empty skies rise
over the benches where old men sit - 
they are desolate and friendless
and the young men spit;
inside they are delicate, but outside they're reckless and
      I reckon 
that these are our heroes,
these are our legends.

From Brand New Ancients. Bloomsbury, 2013.   

Notes on the River 8

Voilà! Slums levelled, wharves, boat ramps,
central planning.
Whites, Koreans, Chinese
in cravats and big sombreros
sip their Caiperoskas
in the Foreign Correspondents Club,
the Nikon 1960 meets
Phnom Penh 2008.
The last His Majesty made Super Eight
for weekly banquets.

In the new arcade of palms
the slave-girl folds her fan
and turns on the air-conditioner.

Adam Aitken. Retirado daqui. 

Bough Down - Karen L. Green

Karen L. Green. Bough Down. Siglio Press, 2013.

Tyler Knott Gregson - from the typewriter series

Retrieved from here.

War Photographer - Carol Ann Duffy

In his dark room he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands, which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black and white
from which his editor will pick out five or six 
for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns his living and they do not care.
New Selected Poems (1984-2004), Picador, 2004.

Because - James Franco

Because

Because I played a Knight,
And was on a screen,
Because I made a million dollars,
Because I was handsome,
Because I had a nice car,
A bunch of girls seem to like me.

But I never met those girls,
I only heard about them.
The only people I saw were the ones who hated me,
And there were so many of those people,
It was easy to forget about the people who I heard
Liked me, and shit, they were all fucking fourteen-year-olds.

And I holed up in my place and read my life away,
And I watched a million movies, twice,
And I didn't understand them any better.

But because I played a Knight,
Because I was handsome,

This was the life I made for myself.

Years later, I decided to look at what I made,
And I watched myself in all the old movies, and I hated the guy
I saw.

But he's the one who stayed after I died.

James Franco. Directing Herbet White: poems. Graywolf Press, 2014. 

Mark Yakich - a poem

Dear Mr. Whitman,

I picked up a hairy little leaf knowing,
As I did every cranny by heart,
How obscure the woods could get.

I came an awfully long way not simply
To listen to my dolly torque up
A little aspiration for the sun.

I was lost in my thoughts or, more
Properly, I was lost in you, Sir.
When I got back home, I had so many

Chores to do that didn’t seem worth
Their names. Now I ask you to help—
Please write me a note from the grave.

Because Daddy still doesn’t believe me
When I tell him that I’m afraid
To mow the grass. Always, Sylvia

The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine, Penguin, 2008

Beaufort Poem Scale - Alice Oswald

As I speak (force 1) smoke rises vertically,
Plumed seeds fall in less than ten seconds
And gossamer, perhaps shaken from the soul's hairbrush
Is seen in the air.

Oh yes (force 2) it's lovely here,
One or two spiders take off
And there are willow seeds in clouds

But I keep feeling (force 3) a scintillation,
As if a southerly light breeze
Was blowing the tips of my thoughts
(force 4) and making my tongue taste strongly of italics

And when I pause it feels different
As if something had entered (force 5) whose hand is lifting my page

(force 6) So I want to tell you how a whole tree sways to the left
But even as I say so (force 7) a persistent howl is blowing my hair horizontal
And even as I speak (force 8) this speaking becomes difficult

And now my voice (force 9) like an umbrella shaken inside out
No longer shelters me from the fact (force 10)
There is suddenly 

a winged thing in the house,
Is it the wind?

Alice Oswald, Beaufort Poem Scale from Conversations with the Wind, 2012, a new collection of eight poems specially commissioned for outdoor arts project. More information here. 

A poem by Geoff Hilsabeck

I spoke with the ugly gas pump,

how to plant an infinite manner: 

as soon as the painters more or less. 

Sorry, I prefer

Geoff Hilsabeck, more here.

Lifting - Ouyang Yu

For years
I have been dreaming
of turning
writing into a sport
in the Olympic Games
that is called, tentatively
Wordlifting
in which I'd give
my simplest performance
by lifting
the lightest and the liveliest
word: Love
till it flies
lifting me, weightless
into a sky
of loving
eyes

Ouyang Yu - taken from here.

From Poetry Games (poems about the olympic games)

You can vote for your favorite.