An announcement from the wonderful Beltway Poetry Quarterly:
Beltway Poetry (http://www.beltwaypoetry.com) opens 2009 with a new issue devoted entirely to poems about museums. Thirty-three poets write about museums, historical sites, and other public places devoted to preservation and exhibition. The poems address the institutions and "their collections, their workers, and the many ways in which they fulfill their founders’ hopes of enlarging the scope of civic life," as guest co-editor Maureen Thorson writes in her introduction. "In these poems, poets engage in conversations with artists, their subjects, and with art itself. They stand in witness to the forces of history."
So join us in this luminous collection of poems. Saundra Rose Maley asks King Tut,"...is there a crossing over/ Or is this life just what it is, a sandal strap/At best?" Margaret Yocom speaks in the voice of a man who amassed old logging equipment for a museum in Maine. Kendra Kopelke lets the woman in a Hopper painting speak: " He put me here/like a candle/to ignite the room." Stephen Cushman imagines painter's models, "posing in a yoga twist,/head going one way, torso another." David Gewanter writes of a museum store clerk, " I love to see my mother behind//the counter, tidying up the fossil fish/and reptile rulers." Linda Pastan contemplates death from a safe distance, asking, " Whose skulls are these,/and isn't it dread/that informs our pleasure//in this canvas?"
And more!
Beltway Poetry Quarterly, now in its ninth year of online publication, is available for free online at http://www.beltwaypoetry.com.
