April Prayer by Stuart Kestenbaum; Sleepless City of Rising Light by Matt Joseph; World Leaders Praise Pakistan as a Mediator by Khushrooh Kasi; The Strongest of the Strange by Charles Bukowski; Ekphrastic Mystery with photo by Don Menges; From the Garden by Anne Sexton
Nutshell:
Nutshell of Poems April 29 _ May 1
April Prayer: Many picked up the echo of the title of this poem from the title of the book from which it is drawn, Prayers and Run-on Sentences. Indeed, the poem seems to be one long stream-of-consciousness sentence that flows up to the end of the 8th line (volta, or turn in a sonnet) when the idea of a mechanical signal enters. Some questioned the word "miracle" on the 9th line as unnecessary and violating the sacrosanct rule of "show don't tell". "Every signal/a call, and the switchboard/ is lighting up... is explicit in hinting at invisible things happening in Spring... and leading smoothly to navigate communication. Some chuckled at the twist of Go make the call as if April were hosting a fund drive. The humor was refreshing.
Sleepless City of Rising Light: This poem is an ekphrasis response to Medellin Majestique (Rattle Magazine, Feb. 2026) by VerDarLuz. Everyone concurred that the poem stands both solidly on its own, as well as enhancing the image, which in turn enhances the poem. It is a welcome portrayal of a city as a place that brings people together, a snapshot of humanity and celebration of diversity. We remarked the virtuosity of the vocabulary in the opening stanzas. The third stanza offers the more gritty and troubling sounds of fights, sights homeless, but immediately counteracts with the rewards of the smells and implied tastes of exotic places. The artist note sums it up: ’ the poem surges with an exotic, eccentric, dynamic energy, carrying so much beautiful texture in its sound and a vivid movement of image—assonance, consonance, and strikingly specific details bringing the dreaming city and its craziness fully alive. Its ferocity and full sensuality—from salsa and bodegas to vagabonds and vendors dissolving into technicolor twilight, a kind of heavy metal bossa nova opera of tastes—create a bulldozing, beautiful chaos that ultimately resolves in a haunting, embodied yearning for answers.”
The opening question implies people as dreamers, all of us involved in a common search for meaning. We questioned why the poet chose "dying". I am reminded that a poem never is about answers. Perhaps the poet wants to tease the reader with the line break, bringing up the inevitability of death, but using the present participle. The occlusives in clenched fists/clutch crumpled lists followed by a thousand scrawled suggestions/a baker's-thousand questions emphasizes our desire that some solution might take place.
World Leaders Praise Pakistan: Listening to the poet read, one hears a faint accent. Her poem is from Readers Respondpublished in Rattle Magazine this month. In this site that lists the winners of the 2023 ICU Youth Poetry Competition, it says she was from Garrison Academy, Quetta in Pakistan and won 3rd place for "Justice in Our Workforce". The question came up whether she wrote the poem in English, or perhaps Urdu and then translated. I couldn't find an answer. However, one feels the hunger about which she writes, and the sharp contrast between the political face of a country, in this case the pride of mediating a global conflict, but which "rests heavy on empty stomachs". We noted the shrinking of the stanzas, as if the words also are hungry, and the pot becomes smaller and smaller space.
The Flower-Fed Buffaloes: recordings of this stentorian performer. You will see selections from The Congo which came up in discussion. The stress of the long O, repeated in ago, low, buffalo accentuates the melancholic elegy for the almost extinction of the Buffalo and implied extinction of indigenous life. There should be a stanza break before repeat of the first line, to accentuate the contrast of the once-was and the shrinking repeated lying low.
The Strongest of the Strange: It is helpful to know the story of this poet who was called "The Laureate of American Lowlife." A rebel against the "elite" and convention, Bukowsky, (1920-1994) is known for his gritty realism relying on anecdotes and his own experiences. He was one of the "strange", and his description of them as "being their own painting" pins down the existential attitude of "allowing ones intensity to roar out" or as he would say, "find what you love and let it kill you." The 20 year old in the poem if not him, could be him. We admired the way one short syllable on a line propelled the poem down the page. When he breaks the line
after I see (sometimes I think/I see/ them— say/ a certain old/man...) one senses he possesses a deeper noticing in his observations.
Ekphrastic Mystery: The cat is out of the bag. AI provided the two stanzas, but no title in response to a request to "write a poem to this picture". Indeed, words help us notice details we might not see in a painting or photograph. We admired the rhyming, not overdone, and in fact, very nicely executed to bring in "brace" for the log and rhyme "blood" with mud, as opposed to a less surprising choice of "flood" or "good" which gave an aliveness to the swamp. The poem works well without the picture, and one has a peaceful sense of very ancient history, the resilience of nature, and what a place might have been like before. Lovely tone of tranquility, but with a hint of something spooky. We were rather discomfited to find out it was AI.
One person brought up the March 2026 New York Times interactive feature titled "Who’s a Better Writer: A.I. or Humans? Take Our Quiz". "The quiz, which garnered over 86,000 participants, presented side-by-side comparisons of human-written and AI-generated passages (primarily using the Claude AI model) across genres including fiction and poetry. Apparently 54% preferred the AI-generated passages, citing higher clarify.
We tried to come up with identifying characteristics of an AI poem, for instance, is it devoid of emotion? Immediately, people thought of instances of human-generated poetry where no emotion is not a bad thing. One person felt the poem had a feel of Elinor Wylie.
In the Anne Sexton poem, we wondered what AI would do with her image of yacht and reference to lilies. Here is an example.
The Garden on the Bay
White lilies drift on glassy sheen,
Amidst the water's quiet green,
While yachts with masts of silver-white,
Reflect the sun's warm morning light.
The petals bow to hulls that pass,
And mirror in the polished glass;
A fragile world of bloom and wood,
Where quiet wealth and nature stood.
— [AI-Generated, 2026]
From the Garden: In our discussion, we noted the biblical references of the first three lines. Who do you think is the speaker of the poem and who is the beloved addressed? Perhaps it is the poet. Perhaps it is the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Is it helpful to know a bit of Anne Sexton's bi-polar history and her institutionalizations? Would it be helpful to know the context of the poem, when it was written? I find such questions are helpful even without answers. A poem is a threshold, as Seamus Heaney puts it, "... approached and constantly departed from at which reader and writer undergo in different ways the experience of being at the same time summoned and released."
I like the line in Sexton's poem: "We talk too much". It seems a fitting way to end this nutshell!
Post Script : What in the world is poetry???
The lost copy of a poem from 7th century came up. The Rome copy is significant because it contains the Old English version in the main body of the text, reflecting the language’s growing status in the ninth century, said Faulkner. “The absence of the poem would have been felt by the readers, I think, and so that’s why it goes in.” The poem is punctuated with a full stop after every word, which shows that word spacing was a relatively new invention, said Faulkner. “It is part of the early development of ways of dividing words and shows text starting to come towards the presentation of English that we know today.”
Eddy mentioned this poem, The Beginning from the Slow Down (I too am intrigued by the lines A pocket / museum A natural / history / of music
The poem-a-day guest editor for May is Hala Alyan. Questions that haunt her: What motivates us? What is meant by desires. Why do we do things not in our interest?
They may indeed be a URL for everything, as she says in one of her poems. My question is whether it will replace the way we pose our own questions on thresholds of poetry, and if so, how?
