Celebrate National Poetry Month with George Braziller

We kicked off National Poetry Month with a beautiful excerpt from Charles Simic's new book, The Renegade. Now that we're almost halfway done (!) with April, it seems like a good time to look at how our poets experience poetry in their work. Every day this week we'll be posting a poem from one of our books that deals with the theme of poetry and writing.

We'll start with Simic again, from his Selected Early Poems:

Poem

My father writes all day, all night:
Writes while he sleeps, writes in his coffin.
It's nice and quiet in our house.
You can see the specks of dust in the sunlight.

I look at times over his shoulders
At all that whiteness. The snow if falling,
As you'd expect. A drop of ink
Gets buried easily, like a footprint.

I, too, would get lost but there's his shadow
On the wall, like a perched owl.
There's the sound of his pen
And the bottle on the table sunk in thought.

When the bottle empties
His great dark hand
Bigger than the earth
Feels for the moon's spigot.