I'll begin the day by pointing

...to John MacKenzie's post on John Thompson and Stilt Jack, Thompson's book of ghazals, a book that I have not yet read even though it has been on my reading list for quite some time.

Though I've only read bits and pieces of Thompson's work, I'm certainly taken by its power. The excerpts from his ghazals that appear in Lorna Crozier's afterword to Bones in Their Wings, her book of ghazals, are enthralling.

It's when poets I admire speak of poets they admire that I get the clearest sense that poetry itself is one great living, lung-powered thing. I can almost see each poet being inhaled, then exhaled. In through the nose, out through the mouth. We are breaths, coming and going.