Showing results for "The Invisible" in Poetry

When a poet addresses a living person - whether friend or enemy, lover or sister - we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy - George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino?

The poems in Hail, the Invisible Watchman are as tidy as a picket-fence—and as suggestive. Behind the charms of iambs lurks a dark exploration of domestic and social alienation. Metered rhyme sets the tone like a chilling piano score as insidiousness creeps into the neighborhood. A spectral narrator surveils social gatherings in the town of Sherbet Lake; community members chime in, each revealing their various troubles and hypocrisies; an eerie reimagining of an Ethel Wilson novel follows a young woman into a taboo friendship with an enigmatic divorcée.

This haunting collection of 15 spoken word pieces penned by a widely published poet interweaves with sound design to create evocative and richly colored works of the imagination. Surreal, with a hint of the fairy tale, crossing grittiness and darkness with sweetness and light, the stories and images seem to emerge from the dream state. The sound design includes original music, found sound, field recordings and electronics, providing a soundscape for the poetry.

Harbour Grids is a long poem in four parts that investigates ideas of community and belonging. Beginning as a meditation on the surface of New York Harbor, the poem radiates outward through issues of labor, location, history, belonging, and subjectivity. How do we experience our complex relations to the world we live in?