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New Poem by Tamar Yoseloff

Good news.  Eyewear has a new poem today from Tamar Yoseloff's forthcoming fourth collection, The City with Horns, published by Salt in May 2011.

Yoseloff is also the author of Marks, with the artist Linda Karshan (Pratt Contemporary Art, 2007) and the editor of A Room to Live In: A Kettle's Yard Anthology (Salt, 2007). She lives in London where she teaches for the Poetry School.


The poem below is from a sequence about the American painter Jackson Pollock.

Connected


I wanted people to sit still
for one goddamn minute but they
flash through your life –

                        portraits are for the dead.

Trees construct themselves into a solid mass
as the horse picks up speed

see, everything's knotted
                                                together
the way notes on a staff spell music, a factory
churns out things, each thing
itself, but also a component.

How easy it is when density
unlaces, and you find holes you can
crawl through –
            light, a parting:

                        Navajo bucks round
a campfire, dancing

if I half-close my eyes, I can make them
leap straight in.


poem by Tamar Yoseloff; published online with permission of the author 

Comments

I like this. Yoseloff successfully relates Pollock's work to the physical world, whereas I normally find his paintings very hard to understand.

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