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Hello poets, friends and followers.
1 January 1965
By Joseph BrodskyThe Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same—
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till stores of candles fail.What prompts this melancholy key?
A long familiar melody.
It sounds again. So let it be.
Let it sound from this night.
Let it sound in my hour of death—
as gratefulness of eyes and lips
for that which sometimes makes us lift
our gaze to the far sky.You glare in silence at the wall.
Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all.
It’s clear that you are now too old
to trust in good Saint Nick;
that it’s too late for miracles.
—But suddenly, lifting your eyes
to heaven’s light, you realize:
your life is a sheer gift.
Last year is not going to history as the greatest years for humanity. But now we have turned pages to the next year.
Today we are opening up again. The dust from last year has been cleaned, the pumps are polished and there are fresh candles burning. It’s a wonderful feeling to start on a new note-book, waiting for all those unwritten lines that are still just seeds waiting to germinate. We are eager to see what you will write. We are here to support and inspire you, and there will be some news coming up during the year to come. There will be new voices behind the bar, there will be fresh faces coming here eager to present their poetry.
We have had some talks about changes behind the scenes, and we have decided to have more occasions to link up. Monday will become a prompt-day and we will expand on the haibun Monday to have it more frequently. On Monday January 18 we will have the premiere of a new recurring challenge.
Check out d’Schedule for a little more info.
But now tell me: Do you have any budding ideas on how to fill those empty notebooks with poignant ink?
Hello friends.. I hope you’ve had a great time while we where closed… A new year… I hope you have plenty of poetry to bring… yet unwritten…
Happy New Year everyone ~ So nice to be back to writing and reading again ~ Looking forward to Poetics tomorrow and OpenLinkNight this Thursday ~
Thank you Bjorn for the lovely poem and this line is wonderful: your life is a sheer gift. As to having some ideas, I thought of keeping a daily journal, just short entries to provide some inspiration later on ~
Looking forward also to our new word challenge on Jan. 18!!!!
What a wonderful idea… I have lots of new photos from Riksmuseum to inspire… what a treat to see the Dutch Masters…
I saw one of your pics, Bjorn, it’s just lovely!
Welcome back, & wow, let’s all get used to the 2016 NEW dVerse schedule. I, of course was geared up for today being a Haibun Monday, but it can go in next Monday. Having more challenges, back to 3 per week should elicit more creativity, perhaps. Change can be, should be growth, once you get your mind & schedule right about it. I should have known not to write a haibun for today, since your blog did not have one on it.
🙂 you know that the haibun always comes with a twist… an image or a quote… or something… I think you will like the new challenge too …
We have OpenLinkNight on Thursday, so you can link it if you like ~ Happy to see that you are excited about the coming changes Glenn ~
I’ll just link it in next Monday; OLN has to be my forum for the next episode of BLACKTHORNE.
I look forward to that….
It will be a photo prompt! 🙂
It will be a photo prompt! 🙂
Glenn, you may want to wait for the post to read it. In addition to a photo, there will be a little bit of a twist.
Happy New Year Björn, and happy new year to everyone. It’s good to see this opened up again. I wish there was a prompt because I’ve been writing like mad this week but I really should be working on my novel anyway. I always sneak back to poetry when I am not looking. First love, you know.
This year I want to finish both novels and a second collection of poems. My new thing I want to try is to write in Twitter, as I have been but perhaps expand that to writing one continuing serial Twitter novel as I have seen others do. Maybe an epic poem in tweet-sized verses. I’m still thinking it over.
Here’s to a great year
I started my poetic journey in twitter… it’s a great format… somehow those 140 characters is great… I remember Sam Peralta showed some examples of his twitter poetry a long time ago…
I love it. It’s helped me in my efforts to make my writing tighter.
I’ll look up Sam Peralta
Check this out https://dversepoets.com/2013/08/01/form-for-all-twitter/
That’s a great story!
Nice that you’re back. I hope to participate more this year. Your changes sound good. Happy New Year to all.
I hope to see you Myrna… your unique voice is a great addition to the bar…
I have a couple of projects on the go. Some of you already know about the sonnet cycle that I’m working on…this project is going a bit slower than I would like, but maybe this year will provide the inspiration that I am needing! I also have an idea germinating in my head for a Christmas poem modelled on “Night Before Christmas”, but telling the story of Christ’s birth. Too early to say whether this poem will actually come to be, and if it does, whether or not it will be ready for Christmas 2016. I am looking forward to seeing what this year brings, though!
I think there is a sweet smell of new poems in the air… a tinge of myrrh and sandalwood perhaps… tomorrow’s the twelfth night isn’t it… Great day for poetry
Happy New Year! It’s so good to be back at the pub! I like the new schedule and am excited to get started!
Great… Tomorrow it starts… And my entry goes up in a couple of hours
This site is always such a fantastic hub of creativity so I’m really excited by the idea of more chances to link up! The new schedule looks really great.
Good to hear… yes we hope to have things for all tastes… 🙂
Happy new year! Happy writing!
Happy New Year to you too.
Happy New Year to everyone! Glad the pub is open for the new year here 🙂 I like the idea of writing in response to artwork. More of anything can be good but quality is more important than quantity…true of prompts and poems, I think.
Ah.. yes artwork can be great… I hope we will have a few of those.
Happy New Year guys…can’t wait for this new challenge
I’m eager too… 🙂
Hello everyone! Happy New Year! We went from 77F to 34F in about 18 hours and had a first snow today. Light flurries but nice to see none the less. First snow got me cranking on several haiku and a haibun in the works. Posted a poem about an experience I had while seeing the new Star Wars movie. I am going to get back to basics and do haibun in the more classic mode – big project! Very different from contemporary where people make a lot of changes to the original format – I’ll be working on using kigo and kireji in the haibun in the original fashion. Hard!!! I am also keeping journal now in the mode of Basho in order to do this more classic form. Will be employing Japanese concepts for these using such things as aware, kigo, kireji and several more concepts.
Ah.. I will go the other direction and write more abstract… 🙂 but poetry is so much different… But I also hope to write more prose.
You do beautifully with prose as well as poetry. I am looking forward to a new year and reading your works. This is actually some discipline for me and including a deeper study of the haibun and its form. I’ve written them for years but realized I needed to go deeper into the form. There is so much more than just construction “poetic prose” or just throwing free verse onto paper. The more I know about this form, the more I realize I need to dig deeper for this incredible form that uses prose and haiku.
I’m going to be traveling for a couple weeks, leaving tomorrow mornin and not sure what internet availability will be like, so I may be absent, but I like the looks of the schedule. Thank you Bjorn, and everyone! To help me write I have started a word doc called “Snippets” and add words, lines, phrases or whatever, when something strikes me. I write on scraps of paper too, and the plan is to copy them to the doc so I don’t look like I’m living in a confetti factory. 🙂
Ha.. I like that idea… since I use google docs I can use my phone or PC or whatever I have to capture the snippets… Sometimes when I’m reading I do that…
And you’re so prolific, Bjorn. You must be getting ‘snippets’ in your head all the time. 🙂
I have a snippets file as well ^_^ It is called ‘mucking about’. The scraps of paper are still fun though, as long as I don’t lose them.
Happy 2016! Looking forward to getting started writing and reading! 🙂
Wonderful .. the more poets we have the happier we are.
So looking forward to another productive year of poetry with all of our dVerse buddies. I’m looking forward to the new opportunities.
Happy 2016 dVerse Peeps.
Being more socially active here at the pub is on my list of desired 2016 experiences. It is great to have the pub open again and I look forward to participating in the poetry fun with all of you.
Great poem Bjorn!
So happy to see you and have you onboard… the challenges starts tomorrow.
Happy New Year all. I’m looking forward to the challenge of new year of poeming. The last six weeks have been a desert of writing so I really need to get back to a schedule and prompts.
And I have a feeling that there is a great prompt already tomorrow… 🙂
Happy new year! My big idea to share is this: how about figuring out ways to meetup in person this year? There are several poetry events happening this fall in NYC. The Dodge Poetry festival is a great place to meet up AND get super charged with poetry, as is the annual Poets Forum held by the American Academy of Poets. The in April in the US there is every ones favorite, NaPoWriMo, and another NaPoWriMo in Nov in Great Britain (or possibly Oct also, not sure). Anyway, it sure would be nice to meetup and hold a Dverse reading or something.
It would be great… it might be hard for me to join.. I have thought a little bit of a virtual on line meetup… it would be fun since we are truly global…
Bjorn, if there was a way for you, and others in Europe (Claudia, Marina Sofia, and others in EU) and Canada to come visit, then I am sure we can arrange at least a few homestays in and near NYC. We would love to have you all come over and gather together!
It would be great… 🙂
Hello all!
Glad to see the updates here!
My goal for this year is to write more, share my writing, and make more poet friends via my blog, so hopefully I can spend lots of time here for the prompts.
Thanks for keeping the spirit of poetry alive for those of us who suffer blocks sometimes. Even when I can’t write, I enjoy lurking and am inspired by the words of others!
I really felt something called block when I started in the new year… but somehow when sitting down at the keyboard the words started flowing again…
Hey everyone…hope that all is well in your part of the world and this year’s beginning brings you new inspiration in poetry and in life. 🙂
I like the new schedule and calendar. Changes and additions are good for the soul. It’s always good to shake things up a bit. 😉
Not a lot of shaking going on… 🙂 just a little bit more of writing.
Happy new year to all from a newcomer! I just joined end of December — so all is quite new to me. Looking forward to being inspired by the group.
A Bostonite….I will be leaving the cold winters here for two months in Bermuda’s winter (average temp 64 degrees). Enjoyed February there so much last year, that we will now stay February and March. Our apartment is right on the St. George Harbor and I expect to spend mornings with my journal and a cup of coffee on our deck, overlooking the gorgeous multicolored-blue-aquamarine waters. A wonderful poetic muse!
Here’s to a wonderful 2016 for all……….
and similart to the last lines in the poem above, I am grateful for every day.
This sounds wonderful.. Cheers from the grey of Amsterdam
Happy new year buddies, good to be back at the pub. All of your have been missed by moi. I smell excitement and great writings this year. Magandan gabi!