Dear friends,

I want to thank you for the most response to my request for recording the poems. We were overwhelmed with almost 500 people signing up and claiming all our poets within the first couple of hours of the newsletter. It’s a testament to how magnificent our readership is and we have been given all the reasons to be grateful.

To return you all a reason for gratitude, I’ve been working on a Leonard Cohen fan site for almost a year and was hoping it’d be ready for his and ONLY POEMS’ birthday on the 21st, but alas, it’s going to take a bit longer, but please know you’re in for a treat in the near future.

Our poet this week is the magical Cole Swensen whose poems are so different from what we think of as contemporary poetry. I’m so in love with her poems and her mind, I can’t wait for you (ones who aren’t familiar with her work already) to be in the presence of her brilliance.

All good things,

​Karan​

P.S.: We have opened a a day early for the $3500 Leonard Cohen Poetry Prize → Send us three poems on the intersections of love, faith & sex.

Poet of the Week

Cole Swensen

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty books of poetry. A former Guggenheim fellow and winner of the National Poetry Series, recipient of the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the PEN USA Award for Literary Translation, she divides her time between France and California.

Rice

More rice is eaten on our planet on any given day than any other thing that anyone might think of putting in a mouth—it amounts to around 525 million metric tons a year, each ton containing over 35,000,000 grains (depending on the type of rice), and it takes as long to cook a single grain as it does to cook a ton—or you could just sit it in the sun and watch it bake across the ages that it takes your name engraved on a grain of rice to become a whole sentence and then a paragraph and then an entire novel, though at that point the letters have gotten so small that you realize, with a sigh, that you’ll never get to know how it ends.

You’ll Never Get to Know How It Ends

On time, the many-worlds theory, and writing from the outer edge of the self

If we recognize ourselves, everything we do and create, and literally everything around us as one continuous nature, we take a different kind of responsibility for it. So, I’m not close to nature, I am nature. Read the full interview →