"in the flood" by Rusty Morrison

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 15, 2017   in the flood   Rusty Morrison

"yes of course" was one speech too many now you've done it exposed your obsequious emphases                            hardly speech if disclosing nothing thought to stay blameless in a well-tended hothouse that's now               out of use beyond wear not in your possession to break out so lay blame on ritual pronouncements like                            the unitary root of the whole is torn       try knitting cozies to hide your household aporias                                           a little more than mortal    how yarn can knit a surface that will flaunt its absences                             looking at it as though it were behind you is how gnats spin a hole in air & then slip right through it               caterpillars moles lost limbs try a little blind reaching surprising what you can find            Copyright © 2017 Rusty Morrison. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "I've been writing about limitation, its frustrations, and the ways that the forces of the unexpected, of excess, can sometimes break up everything I understand, even limits that had begun to feel safe. Because I want to live these experiences in the writing itself, I created a form that demanded I experience these challenges directly—you'll see that each line in the poem that is my own line is seven syllables in length, but all italicized phrases are quotes from Maurice Blanchot and those do not conform to the other lines's syllable count—the quotes 'flood' out of any constriction of syllabics. I chose the quotes before I began writing this poem, so as to let the unexpected quality of their tonalities disrupt my ways of seeing and saying (reading Blanchot always disrupts me, so I wanted to live that experience in the poems)." —Rusty Morrison   Rusty Morrison is the author of Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta Press, 2014). She has been copublisher of Omnidawn Publishing since 2001. Poetry by Morrison   Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta Press, 2014) "What [The flower sermon]" by Ron Silliman "from Please Bury Me in This [I am not any closer...]" by Allison Benis White "Vocabulary" by Jason Schneiderman Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

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