VQR Online

And one day, when, I will cross
Great Water, walk and reach
that final rise

To honor the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition The Art of Romare Bearden, the first comprehensive Bearden retrospective in more than a decade, VQR asked National Book Award-finalist Kevin Young to respond to ten of Bearden’s...

Black mite over the page, furious meander
    of a period untethered.
Black ant over my toes
        lifts by chambers like a lock.

Like a mouth set in the frozen ground.

& how our childhoods were informed by it—this innate sense
     of something missing.

In 1967, Viking Press published The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. Moore’s only explanation for the dozens of published poems eliminated from her “complete” work consisted of the brief epigraph: “Omissions are not accidents.”

Some days there is nothing
of the blues
     I can use
so I put down
my pen & walk instead