“What Does It Even Mean To Write A Poem? It Means Today I’m Correcting My Mistakes. It Means I Don’t

Acanthus    -    William and May Morris, 1874-80.

British,  1862-1938

Embroidery  tile 

Huck

"You might say a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, what connects the first line to the last, the act of keeping together whose nature is to fly apart. Between the first and last lines there exists—a poem—and if it were not for the poem that intervenes, the first and last lines of a poem would not speak to each other. 

Would not speak to each other. Because the lines of a poem are speaking to each other, not you to them or they to you."

—Mary Ruefle, from "On Beginnings" in Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012)

cottagecore dream

Alphonse Mucha, 1902

A very fair question

Olivier Suire Verley

Marlene Dietrich takes a bow at the Théâtre de l’Étoile, Paris, 1959, wearing the Jean Louis swansdown cape

Kate Chopin, from “The Awakening” featured in The Awakening & Selected Stories