"Micro-minutes on Your Way to Work" by Brenda Hillman

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 2, 2018   Micro-minutes on Your Way to Work   Brenda Hillman

Days are unusual. The owl sends            out 5 zeroes from the pines       plus one small silver nothing. Where              do they float? Maybe out to            sea, where jellyfish are aging left & right. They have some nerve.            Today, no new wars, probably. No big button. The owl could be            your scholar of trapped light or Walter Benjamin who writes a storm blows in from paradise. Thinking through            these things each week, you cross the bridge: gold coils, fog, feelings…            syllables also can grow younger like   those jellyfish. You bring your quilt            of questions in the car. At work, you'll have to be patient            at the risky enterprise of talking to other people;  so little progress            in this since the Pleistocene. Mostly, though, you're calm when traveling: silver nothing, moving right & left; day            releasing the caged stars; one thought mixed with no-thought, packed with light…                                              for MK                Copyright © 2018 Brenda Hillman. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "I've been working on and off for about a decade with a procedural form inspired by a Jena Osman essay; the form is six words per line, twenty-four lines. (I try to be strict but sometimes give or take a word or two and consider hyphenated words to be one.) I have used it for some ecopoetic pieces and also for pieces about odd emotions. The challenge is to put a lot of existence in a short space, which is what interests me in poetry in general. This poem originated at dawn when I heard an owl in a Berkeley treetop; I was thinking about the commute of a friend who has to do a lot of work in the public sphere. I often think about non-human energy and life that goes in and out of consciousness simultaneously with historical events. The poem also refers to Walter Benjamin's ideas about history as well as a sense that thought and light are both something and nothing." —Brenda Hillman   Brenda Hillman's most recent poetry collection is Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (Wesleyan University Press), published in February. She received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2012 and currently serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, and lives in the Bay Area with her husband, the poet Robert Hass.   Photo credit: Robert Hass Poetry by Hillman   Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) "as the owl augurs" by Julian Talamantez Brolaski "Costumes Exchanging Glances" by Mary Jo Bang "Sky Lake Redux" by Michele Wolf May Guest Editor: Matthew Shenoda   Thanks to Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2014), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Shenoda and our guest editors for the year. 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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