A few notes from Matthew Zapruder on (re)learning how to read poetry:

We need to try just to be in the poem for a while.

Often we are taught to read poems as if they were a kind of literary sub-species of riddles.

In poems words mean exactly what they always do.

--taken from Poets on Teaching, ed. Joshua Marie Wilkinson

“A successful short poem may be capable of projecting new meanings on successive readings, but in a monolithic way, as if a new room has opened out, rather than in the overall, textured way that a longer poem can light up in a mesh of changeable meanings.”

--Alice Notley, from her Introduction to Ted Berrigan’s Collected Poems

LAST POEM

the sun
a tinkling
cymbal

tin foil / tin foil / tin foil

and I
am becoming

sounding
brass

LAST POEM

I’m shaking
my spurs
rattling
the dirt

from which
I on my horse
did come

to which
I on the ground
now do return

turning over
and over

rattling

there are men
who ride

and there are
men who don't
ride

COLORADO

The letter C
of the state flag
is also red

to represent
the ruddy color of the earth there.





*From the Spanish Word of the Day for "colorado."

PAPPAW

You have to stop
eating so many hamburgers

Your heart can't take
it