Carl Phillips, “Clear, Cloudless”
Tonight—in the foundering night, at least,
of imagination, where what I don’t in fact
believe anymore, all the same, is true—the stars look steadily down upon me. I look
up, at the stars. Life as a recklessly fed bonfire
growing unexpectedly more reckless seems
neither the best nor worst of several choices
within reach, still. I wear on my head a crownof feathers—among which, sure, I have had
my favorites. Fear, though, is the bluest feather,
and it is easily the bluest feather that the wind loves most.
Double Shadow is the eleventh collection of Carl Phillips’ poems. It also includes several poems first published by Kenyon Review, and “Sacrifice Is a Different Animal Altogether,” which was published in Drunken Boat. “Civilization” appeared in The New Yorker, while “Of the Rppling Surface,” “My Bluest Shirt,” and “Master and Slave” appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Here’s some video of Phillips reading for the Cornell creative writing program in the fall of 2010.
3 April 2011 | poetry |
Billy Collins, “Feedback”
The woman who wrote from Phoenix
after my reading thereto tell me they were all still talking about it
just wrote again
to tell me that they had stopped.
Horoscopes for the Dead is the ninth collection from Billy Collins, the former U.S. Poet Laureate (and also a former laureate of New York State). Two other poems from this collection appeared in Poetry: “Memorizing ‘The Sun Rising’ by John Donne” and “The Chairs That No One Sits In.”
2 April 2011 | poetry |