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Poetry explodes globally, not just in Colorado
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"Saved two children last night."
That's the opening line of the second poem written by Hester Knibbe and translated from the Dutch by Jacquelyn Pope that appears in the first pages of Poetry magazine's April translation issue.
The line — and the poem, called "Last Night" — has the star-burst quality I have been reading about in critics who have been writing in Poetry and on the magazine's website, describing a new kind of criticism that is trying to corral the world's explosion of poetry into something understandable, which seems to me as hard as understanding a suicide bomber's accomplishment.
But the reason behind that attempt to corral poetry — rather than tame it — seems to me also an explanation for the explosion of poetry across the globe, not just in Denver and Colorado, which David Milofsky wrote about in The Denver Post on Sunday.
I write about it here all the time: The number of poets writing thousands of poems across the globe that no one intelligence can comprehend in their entirety.
But it's a worldwide movement, a renaissance, that one reader can only hope to catch a fragment of in his or her own moment of time. Give it a try and let me know what you think. A fine place to start is that annual translation issue of Poetry.
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