Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here. Posting striking lines daily on BlueSky

Two weeks ago I briefly touched on the ekphrastic, or poems written about a piece of art. This week, by some weird coincidence, I get to talk about poems written “after” other poems. This issue of “Poetry” publishes ten poems which explicitly note they are “after” another poet and three more that state they were “inspired by” or “for” a poet. In the editor’s note Charif Shananhan draws attention to their editorial lens and closes by saying “No poet sings without first having been sung to.”

This got me thinking about who sang to me and sent me down a rabbit hole of re-reading Patrick Lane’s and Pat Lowther’s poetry, doing almost a complete re-read of Sheila Watson’s “The Double Hook” one evening, and even committing to tracking down a replacement copy of Ted Hughes’s “Crow” and Kenneth Koch’s “The Art of Love” to replace volumes I lent out that were never returned. That’s what is driving my creativity this week. Who sang to you?