Ariana Nadia Nash is a poet of the body, like Neruda, like Whitman, but her poems do not move with Neruda’s desire-driven caprice, nor do they swell with Whitman’s electric and expansive equation of body and soul. Rather, they proceed with the structured precision of a surgeon (the title of her prize-winning collection is revealing in this regard: Instructions for Preparing Your Skin). The first poem below, “To Hold the Body in My Hand,” begins with: “I peel back my skin and scoop.” From there it carefully probes down the page in measured lines that one can’t help but read softly and slowly–an effect of the low enjambment and elaborative syntax (Scoop what? “The origins out of my self.” Like what? “Like embryonic papaya seeds.” From where? “From the center of the fruit”). The relationship with the body in this poem is recursive and seemingly paradoxical: one can both be [...]
Chris Robinson
I first encountered Mark Leidner’s poems on in 2007. Those early poems struck me for how they treated absurd corners of cultural ephemera with the utmost seriousness, and in a vernacular language that seamlessly ascended to momentary heights of poetic beauty. And Leidner read them in an incredibly patient and affectless voice. The overall effect: hilarity and existential wonder. Those poems matured into the material in Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me, often becoming more expansive. The first four poems below feel like an evolution in the opposite direction: Leidner distilled. So much complexity is achieved in the interplay of title and poem, where every word counts. The last poem, “Little Children Riding Dogs,” calls back most to the early work in the wonderful flatness of lines like “also I had this idea” and in its insistence on proceeding with the syntactic “and then” drive of a child’s [...]
I have always admired how Jay Thompson’s poems approach meaning by backing away from it, inhabiting that paradox of quantum observation, that one’s gaze affects reality. In this excerpt from Winter, it is not the superfice, but the essence that is mutable: “day to day only essences change”. A counter-intuitive statement, which perhaps makes more sense if one conflates appearance with essence in an act of reduction, a refusal of the platonic, an offering of respect for each individual thing. Jay Thompson’s metaphysics is not that of Robert Hass, where “each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea,” where the presence of something unique is a “tragic falling off from a first world / of undivided light.” In Thompson’s conception, there are as many essences as there are things and so the act of observation takes on a kind of sacred eros: “how long / since looking [...]
From Chris: Mark Conway’s poems refuse to sit still, even when, or perhaps especially when talking about stillness. The double colons and forward slashes that punctuate these lines seem to me to operate like the stutter or dip of a manual transmission shifting into higher gear, propelling the poem forward. The poem below is about memory (and a particular memory) and how it remains kinetic within its stasis “in the time of the mind,” which shares the mutability of dreams, where rain becomes silk and silk, skin, where the brain is a “pulsing / pink worm that pulls in / all it sees.” In some sense, this poem is playing on loop, and I think you might do well to read it that way. in the orchard * in the time of the mind memories fall like regimes :: lamplights glance off the streets of the lost districts / varnished [...]
From Chris: Richard Armstrong’s poems attempt to say smart things in dumb ways, to slip under the intellectual scrutiny practiced poetry readers bring to bear on unfamiliar work. I am continually surprised by how he is able to create an emotive impact through sloganeering, through the melding of bro-speak, blue-collar imagery, street slang, and archaic capital-R Romantic posturing. Next level shit. Usual Resistance Business was business and required only what was required of us. The tongue found the groove and we found the joys of immobility wearing on us like a condom on a flaccid cock. Still, carefree was the way to be then, amongst the birch-trees and the lunch-trucks. We moved our product. We towed the hotlines… Buffoons with experience assailed us with application forms and drug-urine. We did what we could to keep doing what we could. Like that day in ’98, when the leader of the local [...]
You’re in love. The problem is, you haven’t told the girl, and your brain and your heart have different ideas about how to proceed. Brain vs. heartis a dialog between the brain and the heart of one man as he attempts to “make the move.” Both indulgently prosaic and absurdly poetic, with plenty of in-jokes for computer nerds and literature nerds alike, this beautiful chapbook will make you laugh, cry, and/or hate the authors. LO-RES Chap MED-RES Chap HI-RES Chap: Coming Soon This book is also available in print (at cost). Though this digital chapbook is free, you may want to… About the authors… Christopher Robinson is a writer, teacher, and translator (And illustrator? This is his first stab at it) currently living in the wind. He earned his MA in poetry from Boston University and his MFA from Hunter College. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Alaska [...]
Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Weldon Kees’s poem “1926.”
Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Thomas Lux’s poem “Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy.”
Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Late Ripeness.”
Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Czeslaw Milosz’s poems “On Prayer” and “And Yet the Books.”
Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Heather McHugh’s poem “I Knew I’d Sing.”
Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson briefly discuss Tomas Transtromer’s poems “Street Crossing” and “Face to Face.”
We were a bit behind on posting the latest Poetry Fix. Now we’re up to date! Episode 13: Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson briefly discuss Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese.” Episode 14: Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson briefly discuss John Keats’ poem “This Living Hand.”
Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson briefly discuss baseball haiku.
Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson briefly discuss Terrence Hayes’s poem “Talk.”
Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss William Matthews’s poem “Cheap Seats.”