That’s  the opening stanza of Richard Wilbur’s “The House,” which appeared in The New Yorker on August 31, 2009. Wonderful, isn’t it? But then, it’s Wilbur.—S.Z.

Thanks for your feedback—and your poems. Here’s one that paints a poignant picture in just a few brushstrokes:

Sunset
By Mary Clair Ervin Gildea

Sunset of pink, orange and lavender
Two ivory tapers flicker
Prosecco and Baez
Anticipation excites
Temperature plummets
Intentions discarded
Darkness prevails

Mary Clair Ervin Gildea grew up in the Mississippi Delta and graduated from Millsaps College.  Her poems have been published in Audience, Margin, and Poetically Speaking.  She enjoys participating in the Arlington (VA) Poets Group and discussing the poems read there.

If the spirit moves you, please send a poem and a few lines about yourself to poetryeditor@richerresourcespublications.com.

 Merwin Discovered

Where would we be without librarians? Thanks to librarians everywhere—and to one in particular for providing the source of the wonderful lines by W.S. Merwin quoted in a  previous post: “The Unwritten,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1971.

An Ordinary Fly

“I keep writing about the ordinary,” the poet Philip Levine once told an interviewer, “because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home.”

Welcome to But Does it Rhyme?, a blog for poets who look for the extraordinary in the ordinary world. And what could be more ordinary than a fly? Stopping at a sidewalk cafe after giving a poetry reading, I noticed a fly hovering over the sugar bowl. Here’s what I wrote:

To a Fly on the Sugar Bowl

Gently on the rim of this one
sugar bowl you alight
you among all the interchangeable
members of your species

Each grain of sugar a separate
sweet in the lustrous lenses
of your compound eye
a surfeit of goodness
and you eager to sup

Look back now and see
my hovering hand
ready to brush you aside
to banish your everyday buzz

What do I owe your fragile life
you, one among multitudes
you, twin winged
you, undistinguished
among Diptera
you, in no way individual
in your insectness

What after all does fate owe
to any one life

(copyright © 2012, Sally Zakariya)

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How long is too long? Is shorter better? Like most things about poetry, it depends. Some time ago, I was struck by these powerful but simple lines by former Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin:

“it could be that there’s only one word
and it’s all we need
it’s here in this pencil
every pencil in the world is like this.”

The end of a longer poem, these four lines could surely stand alone, a perfect summation of what it is to write a poem. Or, what it is to know there is a poem to be written.

The passage was quoted in “Rhyme and Reason,” an article by Lauren Wilcox that appeared in the Jan. 16, 2012, issue of The Washington Post Magazine. Wilcox didn’t say what poem the lines are from, and I couldn’t find it. Can anyone help?—S.Z.

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·         What’s the most interesting thing on your desk? Write a rhyming quatrain about it, then try a longer poem in free verse.  

·         Open a book or magazine to any page and pick 10 words on that page at random. (If you close your eyes and point, you’re less likely to shape the outcome by choosing words you know will play well together.) Then use seven or so of these words in a poem. Try it with a group of poets. It’s amazing how different the resulting poems will be.

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Why should we get all the bylines? Submit your latest poem—just one for now—and we’ll publish the poems we like best in an upcoming blog post. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know if the poem is accepted or published elsewhere. Send your poem, plus a few lines about yourself, in the body of an e-mail message to:

            poetryeditor@RicherResourcesPublications.com

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