03 April, 2015: Poetry Makes Nothing Happen
READ A POEM
by Sarah Gridley
Poetry Makes Nothing Happen
Ill at ease interposes a preposition into malaise as if to point to an actual place in the mind of translation. Lu Chi in his Fu of 303 A.D. put the waiting this way: We knock upon silence for an answering music. Everything starts out kicking. Everything dies inside some kind of song. Different musics respond to knocked-on silences: boats in loose percussion with docks – wings that whistle without the form of melody. What if knocking itself could answer knocking. Even the gods had need of a physician. We called the peony after him.
“Poetry Makes Nothing Happen” by Sarah Gridley, from Loom. Omnidawn, 2013. Used by permission of the author.
ABOUT TODAY’S POET
Sarah Gridley is an associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of three books of poetry: Weather Eye Open (University of California Press, 2005), Green Is the Orator (University of California Press, 2010), and Loom (Omnidawn, 2013).
WRITE A POEM
Open yourself up to the subtle music around you.
Gridley’s poem says, “Different musics respond to knocked-on silences” and she describes two – boats and wings. Begin with her quote and describe a list of such musics. Here are a few starters: twigs, keyboards, tambourines, claves, door jambs, ice.