TUESDAY POEM

Tuesday Poem this week is from a work by US writer Lyn Hejinian - selected by Tuesday Poet Bernadette Keating. It begins like this

'You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon. My father had filled an old apothecary jar with what he called "sea glass," bits of old bottles rounded and textured by the sea, so abundant on beaches. There is no solitude. It buries itself in veracity. It is as if one splashed in the water lost by one's tears.'

Bernadette says of it: 'Originally thirty-eight stanzas of thirty-eight lines—Hejinian’s age in 1980—the updated work is forty-five stanzas of forty-five lines. What I sense from this work is that perhaps to characterize a life by its beginning, middle and end, is to restrain the multiple possibilities of thought and action that occur every second and our ability to reference both past and future without reference to structure or according to entertainment value.'

After reading the Tuesday Poem hub, flick into the sidebar to find Jenny Bornholdt's 'Socks', PS Cottier's 'The Exquisite Confusion of the Prose Poem', Keith Westwater's 'Kia Kaha Canterbury, October 2011' and much more.