LITERARY NEWSPAPER | Bel Esprit

Newsletter: March 2023

DAILY NEWS

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PUBLISHED WORK

April 2023

1. Weatherman

Poem by Willow Kang

2. Butterfly

Poem by Tom Vandel

3. One Day in April

Poem by Sheila Dinn

4. Untitled

Photograph by Lisa Finegan

5. Experts on Poetry

6. Book Review: Play the Devil by Scott

Laudati, by Jack Moody

7. Featured Writer: Tom Vandel

Sheila Dinn

Poetry

One Day in April

One day in April I came to know strawberries. Sorting the dark broad leaf of the true from the wrinkled leggy false, following any yellow...

Willow Kang

Poetry

Weatherman

For Ker Vanish Hold the fossils of the flood like a virgin holds a broken heart so soundlessly, as the night caresses a young owl I saw...

Tom Vandel

Poetry

Butterfly

Alone atop A desert bluff, Hand shading my eyes, Watching geese do the butterfly Across the sky, so sure of themselves, Heads held high,...

Michael McPhie

Poetry

Vernal Equinox

The vernal equinox. The first breath of spring returning after a bitter, endless winter. A moment of terrestrial equality, of balance....

PHOTOGRAPHY

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Untitled

By Lisa Finega

WRITING PROMPT

"She paced down the empty aisles of the bookstore in a fury. This anger wouldn't dissipate; the injustice of it brought her hands to her head, her fingers dragging through her hair.

Her arms collapsed back to her sides just as she stumbled over something lying on the waxed wooden floor. She kicked out hard, sending the little red book sliding further down the aisle. She strode after it and kicked it again. Only once she had reached the end of the long aisle did she stoop to pick it up."

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THE EXPERTS

The Experts on Poetry:

"A poet’s work … to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep."

- Salman Rushdie

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."

- W. H. Auden

"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history."

- Plato

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

- Robert Frost

"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."

- William Wordsworth

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

- Oscar Wilde

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”

- Allen Ginsberg

“Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it begins as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.”

- Mary Oliver

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

- Emily Dickinson