Here’s my project. I read a poem a day, imbibe its rhythms and use this as an inspiration for my own writing. Because it’s 2016, I’ll choose 16 quotes from 16 of these poems to feature on A Bigger Brighter World so you’ll get to enjoy a taste of them too. I may not manage it every month. But, if I do, that will equal 16 poems a month for 12 months (meaning 192 poems by the end of the year). There’s still four months more of this excellent feast of poetry to look forward to …

1.  ‘Confusion’ by Kenneth Rexroth

At five o’clock it is a lonely colour in the city. / I pass your home in a rainy evening, / I can see you faintly, moving between lighted walls. / Late at night I sit before a white sheet of paper, / Until a fallen vermilion petal quivers before me.

Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, he was once dubbed ‘Father of the Beats’ by Time. He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic forms such as haiku.

2. ‘The Instinct of Sharks’ by Vanessa Page

Go back to the start, / before the hammerhead light of morning burned the curtains: / unstack and refill plastic cups, distinguish every face / retrace your steps, save your judgement psalms for the unholy // Go back to the start, / before you crept out, drank tap-water from cupped hands: // let the smell of liquor dry out and vanish from your dress / hold everything together, keep your hand on your purse

Vanessa Page is a poet from Cashmere in Queensland. She has published three collections of poetry, including Confessional Box, the winner of the 2013 Anne Elder Award, and China Bull, the winner of the 2015 Work & Tumble Manuscript Prize. ‘The Instinct of Sharks’ was published in Cordite NO THEME V.

3. ‘Voices and Visions’ by Rebecca Kylie Law

We were recalling times / when we raised our voices, / it is because of this, isn’t it / that we continue to prosper, // We had words about the two pastures, / you shepherding your lot and I never // Less the fence and more the difference, / less of me, more of you, / more of me, less of you,

Rebecca Kylie Law is an Australian poet who has published four collections: Offset; Lilies and Stars; The Arrow & The Lyre; and In My Days and In My Sleep. She has been described as ‘a Contemporary Metaphysical poet’ and has spoken openly about the connection between her Catholic faith and her poetry.

4. ‘Precede Me’ by Caitlin Doyle-Markwick

they tell me that to know form one does not need to know light. // to know depth one does not need the perception of sight. / I’ll hold my hands out in front forever now, fingers spread wide to greet the twilight, / and save these weeping eyes for another life.

Caitlin Doyle-Markwick is studying Publishing and Editing at UTS. She is a socialist and refugee rights and education activist, who, in her spare time, writes poetry, makes street art and does improvised theatre. ‘Precede Me’ was published in Cordite NO THEME V.

5. ‘Tigerless’ by Rachel Lewis

Now I am big as she said you were and I would be, / Eye-level with the lightning-riven tree. / But she was wrong as well, said you were wandering / Through forests longer than the sky is high, / Forests full of other fathers. I have looked for you. / I have walked the orange day and the black night. / But I could not even find the forests, could not / Even find the way to you. All I found was men / And the carcasses of lands they leave behind.

Rachel Lewis was one of the 2014 winners of the Cape Farewell/Young Poets Network (of the UK Poetry Society) competition for poems exploring climate change. Cape Farewell is an international not-for-profit organisation set up to instigate a cultural response to climate change.

6. ‘After Norwegian Wood’ by Luke Beesley

he spoke to her using his lunch / she replied with a tight haircut // he sat reading next to her went home / her appointment was an apartment / they sat near the walls // he wiped the bowl she used / her pet / it grew tame

Luke Beesley is a Melbourne-based writer of poetry and short fiction, and an artist and musician. ‘After Norwegian Wood’ appears in his fourth collection of poetry, Jam Sticky Vision.

7. ‘The Sewing Machine is Quietly Grazing’ by Jean Kent

The sewing machine is quietly grazing / in a paddock of flowering viyella— / in the lemon light where it nuzzles the table / bees must have left the falling dust / of pollen—I reach // with a long stalk of cotton to tempt the machine / and granules of working calm settle on my hands. // As close as I may get to touching a dream: / persuading a crop of flowers / to grow down my back

Jean Kent has won many major awards for her writing and her poems and stories have been widely published in literary journals in Australia and overseas. ‘The Sewing Machine is Quietly Grazing’ is in her collection Verandahs. Her most recent chapbook, Paris in My Pocket, brings together poems of time and place first published in 1998, drawn from her first residency at the Cité des Arts in the mid nineties.

8. ‘Elementary Chinese’ by Eileen Chong

A fish needs three drops of water. / The sea: a mother wearing a hat / by the waves. / Thought is composed of strength / from a tree, clear sight, and anchored / by a heart.

Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet. Her first poetry collection, Burning Rice, was shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award, Australian Arts in Asia Award and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Her other books are Peony and Painting Red Orchids.

9. ‘Bonfire’ by Deanna Young

We have no way of knowing, / when we’re young. Only a spark, maybe, that takes, / then rages, keeps driving us toward the door / of a rundown house, ourselves twenty years later. / Struck. Prepared to enter. Standing behind a stroller / before a wall-sized painting of fire by Mary Pratt. / Warming our hands at the edge of art until fire / becomes paint becomes fire again and our face grows hot.

Deanna Young won the 2013 PRISM International Poetry Contest for her poem ‘Bonfire’. Young’s third book of poetry, House Dreams, was nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the Ottawa Book Award and the Archibald Lampman Award. Her previous books are Drunkard’s Path and The Still Before a Storm.

10. ‘On the Outskirts of Work’ by Tomas Tranströmer

The wood has the same light colour / as the skin on someone bathing. // Outside the lamps the September night is totally dark. / When the eyes adjust, there is faint light / over the ground where large snails glide out / and the mushrooms are as numerous as the stars.

Tomas Tranströmer was a Swedish poet and writer, whose poetry has been translated into over 70 languages. Tranströmer has been universally acclaimed as one of the most important European and Scandinavian writers since World War II. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. ‘On the Outskirts of Work’ is in The Great Enigma: New and Collected Poems.

11. Dear Melissa by TC Tolbert

the body is never an accident—someone / I know I am not—letters are inseparable /  from loss—moving what can be still / moved—one is sweeping the mouth— / what ever isn’t skin—take it off—

TC Tolbert is the author of Gephyromania and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Oregon State University-Cascades. Tolbert often identifies as a trans and genderqueer feminist, collaborator, dancer and poet but says s/he’s really just a human in love with humans doing human things.

12. ‘A Slim Volume Taken Into the Provinces’ by Ed Roberson

The ink is thin the paper is poor/ my eyes balance on the pale/ words around which a stream // flows almost erasing / the way across / the idea // Shadows the black flowers / of the light self / sowing through the trees /

Ed Roberson received the 2016 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for outstanding lifetime achievement in the art of poetry. Henry Bienen, president of the Poetry Foundation, honoured Roberson by stating: ‘Ed Roberson is an explorer … [His] ten books of poetry take readers, as they have taken the poet himself, to every corner of the vivid labyrinth of life.’ Roberson’s honours include a Lila Wallace Writers’ Award, a Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, and the 2016 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. His work has been included in Best American Poetry. Poet and critic Michael Palmer has called Roberson ‘one of the most deeply innovative and critically acute voices of our time’.

13. ‘The Names of the Trees’ by Laura Kasischke

I passed this place once long ago / when a man lived here with his four / daughters, peacefully, it seemed. Those // daughters took turns washing / dishes, doing laundry. Frothy pearls and / feathers in a sink. Soft // socks, warm towels, folded, clean, in / closets, drawers, and baskets, and / on shelves. To me // this was astonishing. The laundry / done by daughters! No / mother in the house at all.

Laura Kasischke has published eight collections of poetry, including The Infinitesimals. ‘The Names of the Trees’ is included in the anthology, All We Can Hold: poems of motherhood, from Sage Hill Press. She has written five novels, including The Life Before her Eyes (2002), which was made into a movie starring Uma Thurman. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan.

14. ‘This House is Not a House’ by Tess Jolly

3. The house smells of iron as blood smells of iron. Think of the sticks and the straw / you say, bring milk for the litter of wolves in your bed.

8. The house is an upturned boat. Night after night we lie like this, glad / of our shared pocket of air. We tap out strings of code on the fibreglass / wall: I imagine the stars treading water, you the floating hubcap of the moon.

Tess Jolly works as a library assistant and leads creative writing workshops for children. She has had work published in a wide variety of magazines. She is a UK poet and won the Hamish Canham Prize in 2015.

15. ‘Devil’s Food’ by Gabeba Baderoon

Use your hands. / Feel for the spiky underside of the head / and the soft stem, thinner than your finger. / Probe for the base, push aside / the giving moss, reach / right down, learn by touch alone / when to pull, when it will yield / and come up whole.

Gabeba Baderoon is a prize-winning South African poet. She is the author of three collections of poetry: The Dream in the Next Body, The Museum of Ordinary Life and A Hundred Silences in which ‘Devil’s Food’ appears. She teaches Women’s Studies and African and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

16. ‘The Doubles’ by Kara van de Graaf

In the dressing room at Macy’s, / I run into all my old bodies. / We are reunited when I hear them / shuffling in the walls, sense them / beneath the dirty carpet. Their hips /
lurching out of drywall.

Kara van de Graaf is a writer, teacher, and editor living in Chicago. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Best New Poets and elsewhere. She is co-founder and editor of Lightbox Poetry, an online educational resource for poetry in the classroom.