Tuesday Poem takes you to the stars

At Tuesday Poem this week is a poem by writer and film-maker Kathryn Hunt of Port Townsend, Washington, called Travelling at Night. It is selected by this week's editor Seattle poet T Clear and includes a video of the poet reading. T Clear says,

'I've long enjoyed Kathryn Hunt's work, beginning ten+ years ago when she joined my writing group. There exists in her work an elegance and richness that defies her unadorned use of language. In this poem, especially, we are asked to examine the close-at-hand details of a life lived in intimate contact with the earth -- from "his sideways gimp" to "the missing finger" -- while at the same time standing in awe of the greater vault of the nighttime sky and the profound mysteries it offers. It's a modern and yet age old interpretation of Blake, where he impels us to "Hold infinity in the palm of your hand." '

After reading Kathryn's poems, Tuesday Poem readers are directed to the sidebar on the blog where links take you to the blogs of a the group of Tuesday Poets with their offerings - poems by themselves and poets they've selected for Tuesday. Amongst them, are two poems which like Hunt's poem lifts the reader skywards: Tuesday Poet Zireaux, whose epic novel-in-verse Res Publica was read recently on National Radio's Nine to Noon, is posting the whole poem stanza by stanza on a daily basis and is up to Stanza 20 inspired by the flying figures in a Marc Chagall painting Bestiaire et Musique. Zireaux has also posted a poem by March Chagall (in translation) which deals with the same themes. To read the whole of Res Publica to date, the reader just has to click on the May archive in Zireaux' sidebar and then roll back to May 10 where the poem begins. 

Philadelphian poet Eileen Moeller's poem this week also seems to have been inspired by a painting - a whirl of colour that whirls inside the poem and the person at its heart. And then Jen Compton (Australia/NZ) has posted a link to a poem called Lies by Yevgeny Yevtushenko that made a huge impact on her as a child. She talks about what happened when she met her poetry hero once which included her being tongue-tied. 

Almost as if in reply to that, NZ poet and publisher Helen Rickerby has posted on her blog The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from her 'Nine Movies' sequence which has at its core some wonderful lines about the weight of the great writers :

Running through the passages, tunnels of us
all made of books, stacked floor-
to-ceiling, and if they should topple
we’d be trapped beneath Brontës and Eliots
Dostoyevoskys, Tolstoys
Atwoods and Couplands and Greenes
Living in constant danger of being crushed
by the weight of Western literature
is just one of the risks we take

And there is so much more in the Tuesday Poem site to stimulate and entertain and move you. Why not reach for the stars?  Visit a poem today. Here.