Adam Fitzgerald

CANARY I held my canary out for you when you said your canary felt a little droopy. Your canary was a ruby drop in my frosty glass of canary. The canary between us grew for many days. I wanted to fight the canary, but you held me back. The officer shot the unarmed canary on a canary I used to walk down every day. When you touched the canary underneath my knee, a balloon filled with canary in an eastern corner. The sound of unmarked canaries overhead frightened the rural hospital. The president has never commented publicly on the controversial canary program. Can you remember where that canary was that we tried so many years ago? Oh, that canary feels so good—just like that. The canaries carry electricity to our houses in even smaller canaries. When the activists passed out yellow canaries I took one and read it. A canary [...]

The open sound of French Even the sound of French is open And the children find me very interesting to look at It is as if I am a TV show or supper All my pretty babies who paint the winter chests With red and gold and green It was on the afternoon In the small wooden town That I was so mired in my act of jealousy I did not pay attention To the beauty of the dark church in front of me And now you ask me To meet you in a park after dark Well it is too late too late I am already flying __________________________________________________________ DOROTHEA LASKY is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: THUNDERBIRD (Wave Books, 2012), AWE (Wave Books, 2007) and Black Life (Wave Books, 2010). She is also the author of five chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Ducking [...]

Epithalamium with Rust I remember the dream of rust on its own vague terms: dredging the canal as though it were oneself, hoping for trinkets that fix life to a landscape of flowers and trash, and settling for bothering the levee with a stick, notching my time card in the holy city. In the margins of sky and dust­­­­­––distance specific to the dream of distance–– the thought of water comes on like vanity. It is error, as are the certainties of children, to make much of the dumb bend of sun on copper, to heed what God writes in the sand with his pretty little feet. Crows flood from the factory shell and out over trump ground, into the easy marriage of actuality and nothingness that is the long patina of days, drunk on lawn seed and disquiet. I remember it again, but differently. Archipelagos of debris and glow, stars [...]

Symptoms of Island Sometimes in the morning your hand finds the dip in my side. For the moment we’ll call it happiness. This does not account for weeks spent cursing the apple trees, their sticky bloom. The man on the bus gaping at my slack lip knew. Plump dumb stone in my mouth. I’m sure of it. That afternoon you were a brisk, starched thing. We slipped out the back way, screen door banging cruel on my slim-boned grim. Today, like most days, my mind arrives an island, tongue-numb, child wishes ivied onto me. God takes away, it’s said. Call it what you will. _______________________________________________ Camille Rankine is the author of Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, she is featured as an emerging poet in the fall [...]

Poem in the Manner of Charles Bukowski You do what you want, I’ll do what I want, and we’ll see which one of us gets to the twenty-dollar window in time for the fourth race at Del Mar. On the goddamn radio that’s always playing in my bitch’s kitchen, I heard some East Coast big-shot author say he needs to jerk off before he can write. All is I can say is fuck that shit. I hate poets who beg you to like them because you feel sorry for them. Do not feel sorry for me. I won on Bitches’ Brew in the fourth and went home and drank a fifth of bourbon and got laid. ___________________________________________ David Lehman is the editor of The Oxford American Book of Poetry and series editor of . He teaches at The New School. A special thanks to for letting us use his photos [...]

Seen above, for the first time, is a newly-discovered photograph of Arthur Rimbaud from the 1880s. I quote from the Associated Foreign Press: Unseen photo of French poet Rimbaud unveiled PARIS — A previously unseen photo of French poet Arthur Rimbaud was unveiled in Paris on Thursday, bringing the total number of known images of the writer to eight. The photograph, which shows Rimbaud on the porch of a hotel in Yemen around 1880, was showcased at the International Antiquarian Book Fair at Paris’s Grand Palais exhibition venue. The black and white image is only the fourth to portray the poet as an adult and is “the only one in which Rimbaud’s adult facial characterisics are distinguishable”, according to the poet’s biographer, Jean-Jacques Lefrere. Rimbaud, who was once described by Victor Hugo as “an infant Shakespeare”, produced his best-known works in his late teens. At 20 he gave up poetry [...]

FALSTAFF God save thee, my sweet boy! KING HENRY IV My lord chief-justice, speak to that vain man. LORD CHIEF-JUSTICE Have you your wits? know you what ’tis to speak? FALSTAFF My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart! KING HENRY IV I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! I have long dream’d of such a kind of man, So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so profane; But, being awaked, I do despise my dream. Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace; Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape For thee thrice wider than for other men. Reply not to me with a fool-born jest: Presume not that I am the thing I was; For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, That I have turn’d away my former self; So will I those [...]

She hears, upon that water wide without sound, A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” —Wallace Stevens, ‘Sunday Morning’ “Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.” —T.S. Eliot —Derrida on Christianity & Deconstruction Hegel said we live in a speculative Good Friday—that the moment of philosophy is to think of God’s death, his absence, forseeing at least a hundred years the 20th century. Was there ever a century more sure and fraught with such an absence, devoid of absolute goods, of whatever Christianity meant, beyond its corruptions, scandals and inglorious crusades? 502 (Johnson) At least — to pray — is left [...]

SEGUE SERIES PRESENTS: BENJAMIN FRIEDLANDER AND FANNY HOWE, 4pm, April Segue Series Presents: Benjamin Friedlander and Fanny Howe Benjamin Friedlander’s many books include Time Rations, A Knot Is Not a Tangle, and Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (University of Alabama Press, 2004). He lives and works in Maine. Fanny Howe is a poet, novelist, and short story writer with over 30 titles published. She was the recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. http://www.bowerypoetrylive.com/

So there’s always this double duty, neither to make the best the enemy of the good, nor to make the good the enemy of the best. Scylla and Charybdis. The reason I admire Johnson and Eliot and Empson so much – the thing that holds them together – is that they all think that doing the right thing is steering between two equally dangerous opposite bad things. Do you remember that Eliot was billed as giving a talk on ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ and he’d realized that they’d simply misunderstood. That is, when he was asked what he was going to talk about, he’d said that these things were always a matter of Scylla and Charybdis and so forth, and this became the title of the talk so that we got a talk on this subject because they’d slightly misunderstood what he was saying. But it’s true to him. And Samuel [...]

Below are some candid photos I’ve taken of Poetryland’s Personalities. “One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes… Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.” Mark Strand, Star Black & John Ashbery Mark Strand John Ashbery & David Lehman Harold Bloom Timothy Donnelly Richard Howard Christian Hawkey & Dara Wier Christian Hawkey James Tate Ruth Stone Frank O’Hara’s grave Lucie Brock-Broido & Tree Swenson Paul Mariani anonymous poet Adam Zagajewski John Yau John Ashbery (iPhone wallpaper) Christopher Ricks Linda Gregg Hart [...]

‘Crusoe in England’ was first published in The New Yorker in 1971, then later collected in ‘Geography III,’ perhaps Bishop’s finest single volume of poems. (Only recently I discovered the title of which was suggested to her by John Ashbery. He had found a little geography textbook of the eponymous name, and sent it to her, thinking she’d rather enjoy it. Turns out, she did.) I can’t help thinking ‘Crusoe in England’ is Bishop’s greatest poem, though Bishop is the type of figure who inspires worshippers, and therefore, nearly all of her poems are considered The Greatest, The Most Favorite, The Defining Classic: ‘The Fish,’ ‘At the Fishhouses,’ ‘One Art’ (which wears on me), ‘The Man-Moth,’ etc. Ashbery’s favorite is characteristically ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance.’ After reading it, he wrote Bishop his first and only fan letter and attached the poem he wrote in tribute ‘Soonest Mended.’ [...]

“Growing up in the environment where any notion of gay sex was immediately associated with danger, I learned from the early age how to make the best of it and even enjoy it. I’m not a vanilla person and I’m not into vanilla sex, so naturally role-play and various fetishes are a big part of my aesthetics.” “GET YOUR VILE TENTACLES AWAY FROM ME! – I whispered, surrounded by cretins and fuckheads. — I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING!!! I AM TREASON!!! INFIDELITY IS MINE!!!!” “They say that in order to become a real artist you have to kill your parents. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with my family in general and my Dad in particular. I did a lot of things in order to overcome the complexes that my parents planted into my mind. I haven’t talked to my father in years, but recently he was interviewed for a [...]