MUSED. Organization

Again Later The person you are trying is not accepting. Is not at this time. Please... again. The person you are trying is not in service. Please check that you have. This is your call. Your person is not accepting. Your person is this number. You have not correctly. Your person is a recording. Again later at this time. Not accepting. -Martha Collins - ‘Again Later’ was written some time after I had completed Because What Else Can I Do, a sequence of poems I addressed to my husband following his sudden and shocking death. One day, scrolling through my contacts, I came upon his name and phone numbershis cell and his landlineand called them. The poem is a collage of what I heard. Martha Collins - #MUSED - We're thankful for our partners and supporters like Wells Fargo who help us fulfill our vision to put poetry back into the everyday affairs of the people, period. Want to join our group of savvy supporters who blend art and advertising? Send us a message.

What's New? My heart leaps, running for the stick you never threw.... -James Richardson - Tense. Terse. Impactful. Short poems get us where we’re going quickly, and because there’s no room for meandering, every word carries a lot of weight. Reading or writing a short poem can galvanize us, put us in the here and now. Consider writing a short poem today. As Frost reminds us, we write to discover what we didn't know we knew. - #MUSED - We're thankful for our partners and supporters like Wells Fargo who help us fulfill our vision to put poetry back into the everyday affairs of the people, period. Want to join our group of savvy supporters who blend art and advertising? Send us a message.

Hold your breath: a song of climate change The water’s rising but we’re not drowning yet.... When we’re drowning we’ll do something. When we’re on our roofs. When we’re deciding between saving the cute baby or the smart baby. When there aren’t enough helicopters or news crews to circle over everyone. When sharks are in the streets. When people are dying. When people with wine cellars are dying. We’ll build dams and dikes, put stilts on our V-8s and golf courses, cut down anyone who cuts down a tree, paint our Jesuses green, we’ll grow wings, we’ll go to the moon. Soon. -Bob Hicok - Hold your breath and sing at the same time? Impossible. Yet the excuses for inaction in Bob Hicok’s parable of environmental greed rapidly rise to a rousing chorus of denial. W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety has devolved into an age of outrage whose citizenry has grown adept at justifying procrastination to the point of changing course to suit its comfort. Hicok’s exhortation to accept responsibility for our future falls on conveniently stoppered ears: The final line, with its rhyming monosyllables, lands like a judge’s gavel. - #MUSED - We're thankful for our partners and supporters like Wells Fargo who help us fulfill our vision to put poetry back into the everyday affairs of the people, period. Want to join our group of savvy supporters who blend art and advertising? Send us a message.

In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.... -Ezra Pound - Now compare Pound's poem to this sentence: "When human beings gather in a crowd, they often forfeit their individuality." This statement may be the poem's main idea, but the sentence is comparatively dull, which the poem is intriguing. Pound doesn't even bother with a verb. He maneuvers us in such a way that we'll make the connection between all "the faces" of the metro and the "petals." We can quickly intuit that the crowd of faces is like the many leaves of a flowering tree. And the long dark greasy station is like the wet branch, or "bough." - Kevin Clark. - #MUSED - We're thankful for our partners and supporters like Wells Fargo who help us fulfill our vision to put poetry back into the everyday affairs of the people, period. Want to join our group of savvy supporters who blend art and advertising? Send us a message.

Where the Sidewalk Ends There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins,... And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight To cool in the peppermint wind. Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black And the dark street winds and bends. Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And watch where the chalk-white arrows go To the place where the sidewalk ends. Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go, For the children, they mark, and the children, they know The place where the sidewalk ends. -Shell Silverstein - "Verse is an inextricable part of human existence. We start exposing children to it from the moment they're born, through lullabies, Dr. Seuss books, and Sesame Street segments. But when you look back on who really unlocked the power and potential of poetry for you, there's probably only one answer: Shel Silverstein. Silverstein, born Sheldon Allan on Sept. 25, 1930, had a long and varied career that involved working as a lead cartoonist for Playboy and writing songs for artists like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. If you have a kiddo ages 9-13 at home, consider asking them to pen (or marker) a poem for Lucky Jefferson. Founded in 2018, Lucky Jefferson isn't your typical literary journalthey generate constructive and interactive conversations around poetry, art, and publishing and rethink the way journals are produced and shared with readers and writers. - #MUSED - We're thankful for our partners and supporters like Wells Fargo who help us fulfill our vision to put poetry back into the everyday affairs of the people, period. Want to join our group of savvy supporters who blend art and advertising? Send us a message.

Home is so Sad Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, shaped to the comfort of the last to go as if to win them back. Instead, bereft... of anyone to please, it withers so, having no heart to put aside the theft and turn again to what it started as, a joyous shot at how things ought to be, long fallen wide. You can see how it was: look at the pictures and the cutlery. the music in the piano stool. That vase. - Philip Larkin In 1964 Philip Larkin confirmed his reputation as a major poet with the publication of The Whitsun Weddings, and again in 1974 with High Windows: collections whose searing, often mocking, wit does not conceal the poet's dark vision and underlying obsession with universal themes of mortality, love, and human solitude. #MUSED.