Alina Stefanescu

Sharing 'An ode to horses' from LIGHT YEAR by @jennywcreative.bsky.social as the Year of the Horse begins #lunarnewyear2026
LIGHT YEAR is out this week, have you lined up your copy yet?
ninearchespress.com/publications...

#poemoftheday #poem #poetrycommunity #poetry #chinesenewyear #yearofthehorse

Ever since B born, nothing comes clear. My mind like a mirror that’s been in a fire. Does this happen to the others.
- C. D. Wright

The face forgives the mirror
The worm forgives the plow
The questions begs the answer
- Tom Waits

think sun on gasoline
- Mark Doty

I like the weight I like the lilt, I like the scene. I don’t like the s here but don’t mind it there. I like the noun to situate hue. A gourd is gourd-colored. It’s extra if its sound value complements its substance, say, for example, hock.

- C. D. Wright

Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.

- C. D. Wright

Decide what to look at and how. If you lower your lashes, the blood looks like mud.
- Matthea Harvey

how does the cat continue
to lick itself from toenail to tailhole.
And how does a body break
bread with the word when the word
has broken. Again. And. Again.
- C. D. Wright

Relative Poetics: On C.D. Wright, Appropriation, and the Decentered Self – Post45 Winter outside of Providence; winter in northern lower Michigan. Light like a gnat crawling the walls of a milk-glass jar — between snow and cloud cover, the sun’s pale ricochets subdued. In a copy ro...

This is great. Maybe my favorite critical essay yet about C D Wright, in a cluster of good ones! @jenssread.bsky.social @post45.bsky.social post45.org/2025/11/cd-w...

Ever since B born, nothing comes clear. My mind like a mirror that's been in a fire. Does this happen to the others.
- C. D. Wright

As if this were a cliff
and a witness, that dry birdnote its postulate.
- Forrest Gander

"Another strategy is to create new structures that further the art... Create a langauge the unborn might be unashamed to speak."

- C. D. Wright laying down this gauntlet here for us

🖤

dear humans please join us for this feast of words online!! 🖤

A bird in the hand at RISD.

Larry Levis: For love of immanence. — alina Ştefănescu

Because Larry Levis deserves to be celebrated.

www.alinastefanescuwriter.com/blog/2026/2/16/larry-levis

❤️ thank you dear Dan

I will take any excuse in the book to post one of my favorites by Biolay :)

youtu.be/sVBu5ou9n90?...

Yes it’s a fabulous collection and padam occurs in the title of a number of French songs.

I do not wish to interfere, Reader, with your solitude So different from my own. In fact, I would take back everything I've said here, if that would make you feel any better, Unless even that retraction would amount to a milder way Of interfering; & a way by which you might suspect me Of some subtlety. Or mistake me for someone else, someone Not disinterested enough in what you might think Of this. Of the photograph. Of me. Once, I was in love with a woman, & when I looked at her My face altered & took on the shape of her face, Made thin by alcohol, sorrowing, brave. And though There was a kind of pain in her face, I felt no pain When this happened to mine, when the bones Of my own face seemed to change. But even this Did not do us any good, &, one day,

I do not wish to interfere, Reader, with your solitude—
So different from my own.

- Larry Levis, from “Sensationalism" (in the company of last year’s lilies, as they offered themselves to be portraited in relation to light)

People now confess to all kinds of things, in public, on television. I have a feeling they too make up the things they confess to, just as we did, at seven. But they enjoy it, they like confessing to things. If they've done something that can still shock an audience, they even get paid for it, or make money later by confessing it in a book. They are absolved of their sins by the show's ratings and by book sales. We were supposed to feel embarrassment, shame, and contrition over what we had done. We were just kids. But we tried. We'd shut our eyes and concentrate and try to feel each one of those things. We couldn't, and we would feel sorry when we couldn't. They should have paid us money for it.

Larry Levis on confession.

www.alinastefanescuwriter.com/blog/2024/3/...

“Little Time”: Five Questions for Alina Stefanescu Alina Stefanescu is a present-day poet and writer born in Romania. She currently lives in Alabama with her spouse. She constantly involves herself in the literary community, participating in worksh…

I mentioned Larry Levis here last year, because so many of us have been touched his being in poetry.
ashberyland.com/2024/12/12/l...

:)

Happy Lunar New Year to all‼️‼️‼️ 🐎🐎🐎

Love this generous description of Larry Levis' "system":

"Extant documentation of the state in which Levis's materials were initially found following his death indicates that Levis likely maintain only a very rudimentary organizational system."

Frederick Wiseman, 96, Penetrating Documentarian of Institutions, Dies

Legend. RIP — Frederick Wiseman, 96, Penetrating Documentarian of Institutions, Dies
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/m...

In the City of Light
Larry Levis

Out of respect for someone missing,
I have to say

This isn't the whole story.
The fact is, I was still in love.
My father died, & I was still in love. I know
It's in bad taste to say it quite this way. Tell me,
How would you say it?

And the emptiness of dusk. Someone put it
Crudely: to fuck is to know. If that is true,
There’s a corollary: the soul is a canary sent
Into the mines.

- Larry Levis, "A Letter"

Put the fun back into punishment.
Make a law that loves the one who breaks it .

- Larry Levis

Goodbye, little century.
Goodbye, riderless black horse that trots
From one side of the street to the other,
Trying to find its way
Out of the parade.

- Larry Levis, “Twelve Thirty One Nineteen Ninety Nine”

Beautiful and Hopeless, Bright & Wrong Visit the post for more.

NBCC member Shara Lessley wrote "Beautiful and Hopeless, Bright & Wrong," a critical essay, for Adroit Journal's tribute to Larry Levis:

❤️

Zamopano, what happens next? The clown is dead.

- Larry Levis, “La Strada” https://aprweb.org/poems/la-strada

...nurturing an Eden from which I was already exiling myself. After I had left for good, all I really needed to do was to describe the place exactly as it had been. That I could not do, for that was impossible. And that is where poetry might begin.

- Larry Levis on hometowns