image of note

London’s unsteady skyline
was not a reassuring one
but like a graph that measures
markets, snails and heartbeats.

—Fanny Howe, second stanza of “Primrose for X” from Love and I (Graywolf Press, 2019)

city of words

Poetry is a city of words, a complex heterogeneity that functions both as its parts and as a whole. It’s full of systems—metaphoric, symbolic, sonic—analogous to the sewage, electrical, and transportation systems that animate a city. You look at a jagged skyline, and see the ragged right margin; you read through the quick shifts of much contemporary poetry, and think of a busy intersection in which your view is cut off by a bus one moment, then opened up the next, and then filled with a crowd crossing the street the next.

—Cole Swenson, "Poetry City," Identity Theory, (Oct. 26, 2004, identitytheory.com)

skyline

Each line filled one with the anticipation of being on a road approaching the skyline of a city never visited before.