April 2018
Poetry is a lonely business, but I have a friend who plays guitar, and when I play bass with him, I find community. My most recent book is In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013 and I've had recent poems in Hummingbird, Atticus Review, Hamilton Stone Review, and other literary magazines. I'm honored to serve as managing editor of the Lorine Niedecker Monograph Series, What Region? I blog as The Middlewesterner (www.middlewesterner.com), and have put up at least five little poems a week since mid-2008.
THE POEM
Ah, yes,
the poem
makes each
its own
Big Bang.
Sometime
soon, as
emptiness
fills you,
you too may
understand
the world is
more than
the world is.
POEM IS
Back to
the very
roots of
our words,
the dirt
they come
from, the
pain of
our saying.
Now more
silence
than before
and still
they come
as if with
wisdom.
THE OLD POET TELLS
HOW TO GET THERE
I have become, he said,
what I've wanted to be:
a poet who leaps
beyond his reach,
all the words knowing
more than I know, all
the lines broken just
so. You go along
until you're lost and
the final stop is
somewhere you don't
recognize and between
the words there's a roar
you almost understand.
© 2018 Tom Montag
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