anapoetics

"what the house is saying"

Here is an essay on the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer, who was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In a Tranströmer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive.

"organized and partly enlightened"

This is from a David Kirby review of the latest book of poems by Yusef Komunyakaa:

In A Few Good Voices in My Head, writer and critic Ted Solotaroff says that a piece of writing is often a writer’s “only way to organize and to some extent comprehend life’s fullness and perplexity.” I love that phrase “to some extent.” A piece of writing that led to complete comprehension would turn us all into mute mystics. Isn’t being organized and partly enlightened enough — isn’t it plenty?

Kirby calls the Komunyakaa book "beautiful and hard, too. ... Komunyakaa is not dealing in easy truths."