I would like to launch this blog by sharing a poem about the launching of ships. Several of my friends on Facebook shared this poem yesterday, and I have been reading it over and over. I love how it takes a little fragment of the linguistic whirlwind that is our current cultural climate (an entry from Urban Dictionary!) and expounds upon it, expanding it from clever shard of language into a whole world all its own. On top of that, Olzmann manages to employ Achilles, Odysseus, and the gang without resorting to a tired repetition of the same old stories. My favorite moment in the poem: “it sails/straight out of history into a night so unknowable,/not even the blind eyes of Homer can guess where it will land.” That, to me, is pure ars poetica. Sailing into the unknown.

Here is the link to the poem, published on The Drunken Boat. Olzmann’s other contribution to the issue, “Wreckage Gallery,” also deserves your full attention. And his reading voice is golden.