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"Hush little baby, don't say a word,"

Hush little baby, don't say a word,

Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird.

And if that mockingbird won't sing,

Papa's gonna buy you a diamond ring.

And if that diamond ring turns to brass,

Papa's gonna buy you a looking glass.

And if that looking glass gets broke,

Papa's gonna buy you a billy goat.

And if that billy goat won't pull,

Papa's gonna buy you a cart and bull.

And if that cart and bull turn over,

Papa's gonna buy you a dog named Rover.

And if that dog named Rover won't bark,

Papa's gonna buy you a horse and cart.

And if that horse and cart fall down,

You'll still be the sweetest little baby in town!

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Selected

Poems worth returning to

The length of the wind runs from mid-May to murder. …

Peter Munro

A CAP of lead across the sky …

Emily Dickinson

God of lost souls, thou who are lost amongst the gods, hear me: …

Kahlil Gibran

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know …

Percy Bysshe Shelley

She's led by a dog as black …

William Greenway

Nico Vassilakis uses various processes to bring us to his visual poems. In “phabetical” he uses a toy microscope with a built-in video camera to capture highly magnified images of text, often with his hand moving the microscope across the page to capture still text in motion. As he has done here, Vassilakis sometimes modifies the settings on the camera so that the texts are captured in unnatural colors, and he sometimes reverses the polarity of these to further alter their materiality. In this poem, he has used a software process to band many slips of texts into columns and rows, and he has captured these blocks of text in motion so that we can see all of the middle column but only half of the two columns to either side of it. The result uses Greek letters (an homage to his ancestry) so abstracted that they appear before us almost as concrete images: birds, an arm reaching out, a child kicking a ball. He forces us to see not the common symbols of our alphabet but instead the “phabet”: the pictographs from which all alphabets arose.—Geof Huth …

Nico Vassilakis

I looked up from my writing, …

Thomas Hardy

I think, no matter where you stray, …

Dorothy Parker

The glossary

The language about poetry

From aubade to zuihitsu, 207 definitions of the forms, figures, and schools that shape the line.

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Accentual verseAccentual-syllabic verseAcmeismAlcaicAlexandrineAmbiguity