little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag…

This is the world I want to live in.

firm in texture,
brimming with natural juices.

a crow
Shook down on me…

Here, take this palmful of raspberries…

Devoured in secret,
she was punished for eating it
but loved the bitter wave…

A poem attempting to explain what depression and self-harm feel like.

Tyrant, why swell’st thou thus,
 Of mischief vaunting?

An analysis of a poetic (prophetic), sixteenth century translation of Psalm 52 which shows how religions can provide a dignified response to times of tyranny.

Take a picture and tell the world
what it means, only I wasn’t sure…

Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield,
In your eyes I have read
That to be enthroned is to be enslaved,
And to be understood is to be leveled down

Take your time,
enjoy the fat chill
of each lick

A poem dedicated to George Stinney, Jr.

the aim of the present book, which is based on the workshop “Wandering Religious Poets” held at Stockholm University in 2017, is to highlight some aspects of the religious poet for whom wandering is a lifestyle, as well as the religious poetry which has wandering as its subject – in a variety of religious traditions, societies and different periods of time. Besides Indian, Tibetan, and Japanese, some Indo-European comparative material is included, but we have not been able to cover certain neighbouring areas, like China, where the phenomenon of wandering poets can be found as well.

A child came up to me in the park
and asked for a cigarette.
Her eyes were startled cats…

Remember me, my father sings
to the forest…

She was nearing the river—in reaching the brink,
She heeded no danger, she paused not to think!
For she is a mother—her child, a slave—
And she’ll give him his freedom, or find him a grave!

To be specific, there are practically thousands of
the aforementioned abiding in perpetual near riot
of wild behavior, indiscriminate coloring, and only
the Good Lord Himself can say what diverse soliciting…

Whenever I say “mental content” in English, the Arabic word is maʿnā, and whenever I say “accurate,” “accuracy,” or “accurately” in English, the Arabic word is ḥaqīqah.

An exploration of medieval, Arabic philosophy of language and in particular their attempts to explain the “miracle” of poetry.

Everything is a union of one kind or another.
Foothills know this. Highways too.

Wood duck
I feel for you
You never had hands to stroke
Your own wings

A collection of poems originally written in Braille, ASL, and Protactile by a deafblind poet.

Cintākavi, sutakavi, atthakavi, paṭibhānakavi

The four kinds of poets.

at the farthest reach
of my watering
hose stream
a cabbage white
flutters a while

… an important technical contribution to English-language poetry written in the Japanese style in Canada.

For people who say they have no religious impulse whatsoever… really? You have never felt overwhelmed by, in some way inadequate to, an experience in your life? Have never felt in yourself something staking a claim beyond yourself? Some wordless mystery straining through words to reach you? Never??

Now, what we can say is that, it is within these spaces of practices of mental cultivation that poetry, in the Buddhist world, takes its place, as well as being part of literary culture; as well as being part of religious culture. But, it has a central place in the practice of mental cultivation. 

In this lecture, Professor Charles Hallisey describes how Buddhism has historically used poetry as a vehicle for its teachings. Further, through various examples, he offers the idea that, in the Buddhist world, scholatiscism and poetry are forms of mental cultivation as much as meditation and ritual and have always been so. 

Sunday morning, the wind has washed our minds,
the streets are bleak…

What shall meadow hold to please me,
Spreading wide its scented waving…

The precariousness of intimate speech adds to its power and the power of the reader, through whose agency the voice is encouraged in its urgent plea or confidence.

Poet Louise Glück graciously accepts the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature in a master class of rhetoric and humility.

You can also watch Glück rereading her speech for the Nobel YouTube channel just months before she passed away from cancer in 2023.

In the poetic commentary Nameless Notes (1211–1216), the poet-priest Kamo no Chōmei explains that unlike prose, a poem “possesses the power to move heaven and earth, to calm demons and gods,” because, among other attributes, “it contains many truths in a single word.”

The supernatural powers of Japanese poetry are widely documented in literature of Heian and medieval Japan. Twentieth-century scholars have tended to follow Orikuchi Shinobu in interpreting and discussing miraculous verses in terms of ancient (pre-Buddhist) beliefs in kotodama, the magic spirit power of special words. In this paper, I argue for application of a more contemporaneous hermeneutical approach: thirteenth-century Japanese dharani theory, according to which Japanese poetry is capable of supernatural effects because it contains truth (kotowari) in a semantic superabundance.

I know there are different worlds…

An analysis of this airy, Anishinaabemowin song about the space between us.

For an interview with this poet, listen to the bonus episode.

Curled thrush song staggering over moral tally
Number is all wrote Baudelaire
Fox kits hunting solitary voles
So many beings here without despair

The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth

I am only kind to my father
in poems he will never read.

Ah poetry,
god of molting turkeys, save
my brother from the truck

I was the angry one, and I was the sad one,
and I am the head shaking in wonder

How “Buddhist” do you think this poem is? Can it be interpreted in multiple ways? How does it make you feel about the world?

i have so much hope for the future

i hope everyone gets everything they deserve

in Rangjung Dorje’s poems, the environment is presented as a catalyst for seeing the enlightened “view”. This paper looks at the metaphorical landscape that Rangjung Dorje’s poems evoke, or, to incorporate a helpful term from contemporary literary studies, their “psychogeography”, their “sense of place”.

To have rejected strategy; to sit, instead, with one’s bafflement

In days I hope will come…

It’s holding a little, obsidian shard of the experience of being human. And because it’s gone into print, other people can read it and they can laugh with me at all our hope and uselessness

The poem is the evidence of the survival. And that comes as a great comfort when we’re not sure if we’ll survive what has been asked of us. I have come to really value this quality of humility as something that helps me get through the day.

My God is still there, the one I prayed to as a boy:
he never answered but that didn’t keep me
from calling out to him.

Please, O Lord, may all the boons
for which I fervently pray
come true at once and come to be
from now until nirvana’s time!

… highlights of the Cambodian Dharma song tradition. Many of the most popular songs are included, along with others of exceptional interest or literary merit. All of the major themes of the genre are covered: the life of the Buddha, gratitude to parents, the impermanence of the body, and [the] aspiration for nirvana.

Listen to an interview with the author on the New Books Network or hear him perform a few of the songs from this book on Shambhala’s website. And for the author’s previous translations and performances, see his open-access album “Stirring and Stilling” (2011).

The book also contains a number of original essays on the history of Cambodian Buddhism and its poetry, alongside a thorough bibliography for the author’s sources.

my uncle
rose at dawn
and stepped outside—to find
his paddocks gone

when the day calls i will answer

We were thirty-one souls, he said, in the gray-sick of sea…

All those times I was bored…

Blessed be the bitterness
at your core, that quiet light…

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert….

I, Li Bo, love wine completely, right now. How to attain the immortality within wine? This Dao always gets muddled. Don’t look for it in a ladle! The deity of drunkenness will give transmission to whoever is chosen.

An anthology of writing by and about the legendary swashbuckler-poet of Tang China.

… poets do not [normally] get this kind of attention

The story of an unusual fence in New York City and its bold rejection of cynicism.

I had this sureal sense of vertigo where I felt like I was constantly teetering over the edge of something that I didn’t understand. The entire town was built on top of bombs.

Leah Zani discusses her field work in Laos, where the CIA secretly carried out the largest bombing campaign in history, and how she navigated and charted this delicate history of military waste.