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Today's poem is "Tilikum"
from Einstein's Lawn

Dos Madres Press

Stuart Bartow teaches writing and literature at SUNY (State University of New York) Adirondack, where he directs the college's Writers Project. He is also chair of the Battenkill Conservancy, a grassroots environmental group. His most recent book, Teaching Trout to Talk: the Zen of Small Stream Fly Fishing, received the 2014 Adirondack Center for Writing non-Fiction Award. He lives near the Vermont-New York border where he likes to hike and fish.

Other poems by Stuart Bartow in Verse Daily:
October 26, 2011:   "Syrens" "Often they are described as twain, but who thinks..."
July 10, 2007:   "Centaurs" " Not yet apparitions, they came to fetch me..."

Books by Stuart Bartow:

Other poems on the web by Stuart Bartow:
Three poems
"We Have No Word for Wanting a Storm to Come"
"Green Bottle"
"What My Father-in-Law Says"
"We Are All On the Edge of Something"
Three poems
Two poems
"Helen Agonistes"

Stuart Bartow's Website.

Stuart Bartow According to Wikipedia.

Stuart Bartow on Twitter.

About Einstein's Lawn:

"In Stuart s work I admire the startling leap from the mundane and specific to the sublime; each poem is a kind of silvery bridge between our everyday experiences and the heights to which our sensibilities soar from time to time. Sometimes his poems remind me of the pictures I ve seen of the slender, lacy bridges the Arabs strung across Andalusian chasms."
—Djelloul Marbrook

"Stuart Bartow s EINSTEIN S LAWN takes more than one leaf of grass from Whitman in creating a capacious, tender, and, finally, unifying field. He does this by showing the invisible at play. Once on the other side of time / the beginning begins again. Bartow tells us, as if to indicate what happens to the man painting a painting of a man painting a painting in an infinite regression. These poems exist on the threshold where each of us carries a labyrinth into a labyrinth. Einstein s unruly head of hair, the chaos of his desk, are proofs of his general relativity theory, and the quantum universe embedded in the human heart. We are warned the very thing you are trying to capture / will disappear as instantly as a person / in a dream, a fish panicked by a shadow. Even so, there is the wind that embraces us / like a being that seeks to wind us into one. This includes Mary Shelley s deathless Frankenstein s creature, the monster who ventures north where icy winds weave a blanket around him as a mother might. The poems in this rare collection are always moving toward epiphanies that leave us feeling as though we d stepped into a momentary glimpse and lived there for a lifetime."
—Paul Pines

"In his fabulous new book Stuart Bartow makes physics poems that successfully mix the language of literature, science, and popular culture. Bartow s range is vast, like that of other cultural technicians such as Albert Goldbarth. Bartow is expertly referential across the so-called high and low spectrum, equally comfortable discussing Saint Francis as he is Zombies, the Kronos Quartet to Buster Keaton, and a sequence of humanizing poems on Albert Einstein, all driven by a precise lyric eye/I. Bartow s poems suggest there is never nothing to write about, in fact the world is such a vast subject, this life we live of loss and joy can we ever figure it out? But perhaps there is an answer in poetry (much like physics?) Or as Bartow suggests, that poems make a kind/of sense of their own and if you can feel/that, you know how divine/beings might see this world."
—Sean Thomas Dougherty



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