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. That’s 16 poems a month for 12 months (meaning 192 poems by the end of the year). After this, there’s just one more month of this excellent feast of poetry to look forward to …

1. ‘Ode to Disappointment’ by David Kirby

Camus. Have a cup of coffee, Albert! You can always kill / yourself later. You can always read philosopher Gaston Bachelard, / who says the truest thing: Bachelard says / we always begin in joy and end by organising our disappointment

David Kirby, the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University, has received numerous Pushcart Prizes and other awards for his work. His poetry collections include The Ha-Ha, The House of Blue Light, Talking about Movies with Jesus, and The House on Boulevard St., a finalist for the National Book Award. ‘Ode to Disappointment’ is from his collection Get Up, Please.

2. ‘Jasper’ by Tony Conran (1931 – 2013)

for John Jones the potter /

It is Welsh rock, John. A vein of it runs / In the nape / Of the hanging coast where the oaktrees / Knot the Straits into shape. / Earth, water and fire! and a girl’s hand that gave it / Dearer to me / Than gold! – I send you this shard from the wheel / Of the Welsh sea.

Tony Conran was a poet, critic and translator, who published many volumes of poetry in his lifetime. ‘Jasper’ was chosen by Carol Rumens as poem of the week in The Guardian published on April 25. Rumens said, ‘His [Conran’s] 1998 collection, Eros Proposes a Toast: Collected Public Poems and Gifts, testifies to a further talent, often rare in that rivalrous breed called poet: the talent of friendship … It’s unusual to read a collection in English of poems in which other lives are so integral to the text and the texture of feeling.’ Conran’s final collection, Three Symphonies, was published in May 2016 by Agenda Editions.

3. ‘On a Day, in the World’ by Brenda Hillman

We had a grief / we didn’t understand while / standing at the edge of /
some low scrub hills as if / humans were extra / or already gone — ; // what had been in us before?

Brenda Hillman is the author of nine collections of poetry from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Practical Water (2009) and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013). She lives in the Bay Area where she is Olivia Filippi Professor at Saint Mary’s College. She has won many prestige poetry awards and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2016. ‘On a Day, in the World’ was published in the Kenyon Review in September / October 2015.

4. ‘I have a hat with tiny woolen ears’ by Emilie Zoey Baker

I can hear my cat dreaming / her thoughts click like knitting needles. / Rocks sing low deep songs with no human words / trees make jokes about the rain / their laughter sounds like one thousand miniature gongs. / I can hear fossils inside mountains, / they turn in their sleep.

Emilie Zoey Baker is an award-winning Australian poet and spoken-word performer who has toured the world performing and writing poetry. She was the winner of the 2010 Berlin International Literature Festival’s poetry slam Slam!Review. She performs regularly at arts and literature festivals, teaches poetry and slam in schools and, in April 2014, she was core faculty for the Spoken Word Program at Canada’s Banff Centre. She has published widely both in Australia and overseas and is the author of 14 children’s books.

5. ‘At Night the States’ by Alice Notley

At night the states / talk. My initial continuing contra- / diction / my love for you & that for me / deep down in the Purple Plant the oldest / dust / of it is sweetest but states no longer / how I / would feel. Shirt / that shirt has been in your arms / And I have / that shirt is how I feel

Alice Notley has become one of America’s greatest living poets. She has long written in narrative and epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of the self and the social and cultural importance of disobedience. She is the author of over 25 books of poetry and her honours and awards include an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2015, she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

6. ‘Dream of a Language that Speaks’ by Michael Palmer

So few and so many, / have we come this far? // Sluicing ink onto snow? / I’m tired, Gozo, // tired of the us/not us, / of the factories of blood, // tired of the multiplying suns / and tired of colliding with // the words as they appear / without so much as a “by your leave,”

Michael Palmer has written over a dozen books of poetry, and has translated poetry from Spanish, French, Portuguese and Russian. His work has been translated into over twenty-five languages and has received numerous awards including the American Award for Poetry and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. From 1999 to 2004, he was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. ‘Dream of a Language that Speaks’ is from his collection Company of Moths.

7. ‘sand’ by joanne burns

like a large almond / the miniature box of worry / dolls, each smaller than a / match, sits there on a bookshelf /  fading in the sunlight like all my / good intentions down the multiplying / years; these dolls stay pristine, bright / inside like cocktail onions – i do all / the worrying, bleached of any colour, / while individually unnamed they bide / their time –

joanne burns is a contemporary Australian poet and prose writer who has published more than a dozen books of poetry and whose poems have appeared in numerous Australian and overseas literary journals and poetry magazines. She was awarded the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for her most recent collection brush (published by Giramondo). The prize was presented to her at the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards ceremony on May 16, 2016.

8. ‘Lifting Belly – Part II’ by Gertrude Stein

Lifting belly is so dear. / Lifting belly is here. / Did we not hear and we were walking leave it to me and say come quickly now. He is not sleepy. At last I know why he laughs. Do you. / I will not imitate colors. From the stand point of white yellow is coloured. Do you mean bushes. No I mean acacias. Lilacs do fade. What did you say for lifting belly. Extra. / Extra thunder. I can so easily be fastidious.

Gertrude Stein was an American poet, novelist, playwright and art collector who lived most of her life in Paris where she hosted a salon where the leading figures in modernism in literature and art would meet. Among Stein’s most influential works are The Making of Americans, How to Write, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which was a bestseller, and Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems [1929-1933].

9. ‘In Memorium: Gillian Rose’ by Geoffrey Hill

I have a question to ask for the form’s sake: / how that small happy boy in the seaside / photographs became the unstable man, hobbyist of his own rage, engrafting it / on a stock of compliance, of hurt women. /

Geoffrey Hill was known as one of the greatest poets of his generation writing in English, and one of the most important poets of the 20th century. He lived a life dedicated to poetry and scholarship, morality and faith and received numerous awards and honours for his work, including the Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Loines Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010 he was elected to serve as Professor of Poetry at Oxford for five years and was knighted in 2012. He died in June 2016, leaving behind a massive collection of poetry and criticism dating back to the 1950s.

10. ‘What They Did Yesterday Afternoon’ by Warsan Shire

later that night / i held an atlas in my lap / ran my fingers across the whole world / and whispered / where does it hurt? // it answered / everywhere / everywhere / everywhere.

Warsan Shire is a London-based Somali writer, poet, editor and teacher. She has received the Brunei University’s African Poetry Prize and has read her poetry in various artistic venues throughout the world. She has published several poetry pamphlets and in 2016 is working on her first full-length poetry volume.

11. ‘Still Falling’ by Maggie Dietz

Tusks of steel, the busted girders, / Skulls of rooms; the sun’s ghost lingers / Over skewed pipes and crusts of windows // Scattered among the shattered people. / Later the moon, a flake of opal, / Oversees the writhing rubble:

Maggie Dietz is the author of Perennial Fall and co-editor of Americans’ Favorite Poems, Poems to Read, and An Invitation to Poetry. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. ‘Still Falling is from her second collection That Kind of Happy.

12. ‘Late Echo’ by John Ashbery

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally / And the colour of the day put in / Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter / For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic / Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

John Ashbery has published more than 20 books of poetry. He has won nearly every major American award for poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and served as the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003. Langdon Hammer, chairman of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008, ‘No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery.’ ‘Late Echo’ is from his collection As We Know.

13. ‘Table Bay’ by Ben Jackson

he picked at each / hook of the lure, /a solemn, meticulous // sifting as if he were / parting skin / for a splinter in my palm. // His touch travelled /the line, the rod, / into my hand.

Ben Jackson’s poems have appeared in Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Hudson Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His awards include the 2015 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry as well as residencies from Vermont Studio Center, Jentel Artist Residency Program, and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. ‘Table Bay’ was published in New England Review Volume 37, Number 2 / 2016.

14. ‘Swan Geese’ by Sara Berkeley Tolchin

Sure, I have to keep the tools / handy, but the real test comes / when two geese / fly honking over the hot cars / in the Target parking lot. / I’m squinting up at the sky / with no words to convey / the haunting evocative sound /they put out, nor the tumbling / card house memories they stir,

Sara Berkeley Tolchin was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of California, Berkeley.  She has published several poetry and short story collections and ‘Swan Geese’ is from her most recent book, What Just Happened.

15. ‘Universality’ by Alicia Sometimes

This hill, with its cape of wind and ebb of solace / allow me to reach out and stroke Jupiter’s moons. / Peering into the beginnings of things. // You stand beside me in that tan, torn coat / as stellar showers squint in the dark face of time. // ii. //

How large our curiosity looms. / Your knot-thick hands clasp the creases of the hardwood. / Peering up from the malt-stream deciphering knowledge perpendicular.

Alica Sometimes is a writer, poet, broadcaster and musician. Her poems have been in Best Australian Poems, Overland, Southerly, Westerly, and The Age. She recently edited (with Nicole Hayes) From the Outer: Footy like you’ve never heard it (Black Inc.), an anthology of football stories. ‘Universality’ was ABR’s poem of the week on June 5, 2016.

16. ‘Korea, North Korea’ by Yin Lichuan

I want to go to Korea / I want to go back forty years /  to an afternoon of my father /
in the midst of crowds in torrents of red flags /  I want to stand next to him /
to keep him company, so he won’t feel lonely / at that time, the sun so intense / people suffocated

Yin Lichuan is a poet, fiction writer, film director, and scriptwriter, who rose to literary notoriety as a founder of the ‘Lower Body’ movement, based in Beijing during the early 2000s. Her publications include a collection of selected writings, Feel a Bit More Comfort; a novel, Bitch; and three volumes of poetry.‘Korea, North Korea’ is translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and was published in New England Review ,Volume 36, Number 2 / 2015.