Micah Towery

No Longer I am rails no longer. I have hips now, and breasts that stick out past my ribs, though the alchemy of metabolism makes them protrude, too. I am no longer whittled, though my fingers still get cold, but there is something to me now, some substance. I have content—more than just skin and bones. Meat on my bones, I signify something, am able to create. That this body could now produce a child scares me, but it’s less frightening than passing out, than the jut of hips and wristbone and no ass. And, now, when he holds me, I know it’s not just to cling to my body, but to grasp onto what’s inside. And the starved girl, the one within me, weeps, for she is filled. ___________________________________________________ An alumna of Barnard College, Marissa Mazek is currently a Creative Writing MFA candidate at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. [...]

Confessions I’ve got the loveliest bones. Ivory sticks ______clink -clinking, bones go with any outfit small enough not to cinch skeleton elbows, knees creak when I walk, rivals run scared when they see bones coming— ______I’ve got the loveliest bones. Toothpick-ing my place at the tented freak-show, eyes comb over these blue-ribbon bones. Cheeky endorsements by Dove, ______Clinique, ____________Mary Kay __________________Cover Girl clink-clinging to Mark Ecko’s mirror mirror on the wall, who’s got the loveliest bones of all? He’ll say, ______My dear you have the whitest bones, ____________the thinnest hair, ____________skin cold as stone, ____________eroding teeth, ____________a weak heartbeat, ____________chronic fatigue, but… ______you sure do have the loveliest bones…. Playhouse glass twists a sinister smile, s t r e t c h i n g my thigh gap for runway miles. Skeletons waltz in my closet clink-clatter all night ______the mattress grinds my scorpion spine; weak and lethargic these bones [...]

Forward Reflection I once thought, someday I’ll outrun this skin. That someday body love will win. Dreamed of acceptance, met with rejection at almost every turn I made. My tears kept me company through the haze. I carved through me, pushed my flesh to the edge. I found freedom in water, and eventually this skin. My curves have grown and sagged some, but I won’t let shame keep me undone. For it’s not the tomorrows that should win, or the somedays. It’s this ever cycling present moment, of mindful reflection. Of a body positive mind, pushing me in a better direction. So I put my mirror back on the wall. I stopped wishing through it, and learned not to just dream it, but do it. To radically accept the person I am now. In the end, it’s always progression not perfection, that keeps me moving in a forward direction. _________________________________________ [...]

NOTE: Adele and I started this interview a while back and I never had the chance to post it. Some of the elements refer to her book as a recent publication. MT: I first want to comment on what I see as the arc of this collection, What Matters. Memory, in this book, seems like a kind of sacrament: memorializing literally makes real by nature of the act. I’m thinking especially of the line “language…larger than / logic” (“The Sap Bush”). (I’ve chopped that line up, but it seemed so evocative to me that I couldn’t bypass it.) The first section fulfills and meditates on this traditional task of the poet. Then the second section puts that function into crisis—the poet dies (or rather confronts the possibility of her own death). The crisis is (I think), if the memorializer dies, how do those that the poet loves (including herself) continue [...]

INTRO: In what we hope will be a regular feature, THEthe Poetry will be showcasing presses–of all backgrounds, ambitions, and oeuvres. Each feature will include some questions about the press and a sampler of the published work. The first featured press is Called Back Books. —a new press run out of Oakland, CA and crafted by the poets Sharon Zetter and Lucas M. Rivera—stresses the import of THE BOOK and will be focusing on small volumes from emerging writers, highlighting the discourse of POETRY and a range of mediums germane to the question of ART, METAPHYSICS, LANGUAGE, ETHICS, ETC. CALLED BACK BOOKS will also make exacting efforts to generate dialogue within a narrow sense of the poetry community and will not stray from polemical, argumentative, and outright adversarial discourses (while avoiding ad hominem, cliché, and juvenile antics). CALLED BACK BOOKS deemphasizes the temporary for the temporal and aligns itself with [...]

Maria, thanks for agreeing to this interview. I wanted to start by discussing your book Writing Poetry to Save Your Life, particularly the idea of “personal poetry.” Could you start by explaining what your vision of that is? My vision of poetry is that it should be based on some essential truth about what it means to be human and I think narrative poetry gets at those truths more directly and effectively than many other types of poetry. I want to give people permission to tell their own stories and to look at the world unflinchingly through the their own eyes rather than worrying about what critics or literary theorists say about writing. Like Faulkner, I believe literature is about the truths of the human heart and not about intellectual analysis. I trust the old lady who lives in my belly more than I trust intellect when writing a poem, [...]

Transcendent Beauty in Yeats and Keats The works of W. B. Yeats and John Keats are interestingly similar in style and concept. Both rely heavily on imagery. Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” is full of sensory imagery describing the journey to an ideal place, just as Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is beautifully portraying the significance of an ancient art on an urn. Both use metaphor to deal with the idea of aging, the concept of time, and the permanence of art compared to the fleeting nature of life. The examination of immortality is a common thread in both and is seen as an achievement. Yeats and Keats come to the conclusion that aesthetic permanence is transcendent beauty. Imagery and metaphor in “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and “Sailing to Byzantium” are used to convey the poetic speakers’ beliefs that being an “artifice of eternity” is the ultimate achievement of [...]

Revealing the presence of order in “The Idea of Order at Key West” “The Idea of Order at Key West” was written by Wallace Stevens, a ‘transcendentalist’ in the modernism era. Steven’s poetry reflected works similar to those of Whitman and Wordsworth in that he loved writing on concepts of the natural world to help discover and create personal meaning. Stevens often took vacations to Florida where the serenity of peace and beauty inspired him to write and reflect on deeper philosophical issues such as natural order, chaos, and the deep internal desires of the self (Morse 140). “The Idea of Order at Key West” emphasizes the internal longing to create meaning for order within the natural world, and to discover the role of man’s origin and the self’s purpose. However, in order for such meaning to be made obvious over the chaos, the order at Key West can only [...]

In 1985, two professors of physics published some research about the extent to which a physics class impacted students’ intuitive understanding of motion. Like most of us, the students had a more Aristotelian model–the one that seems to fit with common sense: e.g., heavy objects fall faster rate than lighter ones. The goal was to see how many students internalized the Newtonian model by the end of the semester: e.g., heavy and light objects fall at the same rate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that many students retained the Aristotelian model after the course. The professors were surprised, however, that even A-students–those who had demonstrated competence on exams that tested ability to use and apply Newtonian concepts of motion–even these students still retained the Aristotelian model. Shockingly, the students would rationalize their belief in such models even when shown evidence to the contrary. It’s a truism that we education is more [...]

Poems are “instruments for thinking” (Allen Grossman). The object of a poet’s thought, however, is often unstated–especially in lyric poetry. Lyric poetry never speaks to an audience, and so–as it is when we are alone–the speaker does not feel compelled to explicitly state the object of thought but only the thoughts themselves. In this review, I want to try and discern these objects of thought in the works of two poets whose work seem directed at resolving particularly spiritual problems. *** diatomhero: religious poems The primary question about Lisa A Flowers’ work is this: What spiritual universe does her poetry inhabit? What are its rules and how do those govern the assumptions and hence possibilities/ambitions of her work? It seems to be a world in which incarnation is the rule, and yet there is also a kind of Heaven and Hell–locations that suggest some kind of finality. The figure of [...]

Massachusetts writers hold a great position of influence in American writing. Some of this is just a matter of timing: Massachusetts had a kind of head start in fostering talent, and such advantages inevitably become influence (“whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance”). But perhaps it’s better not to speak of “influence”; instead, I would claim that Bradstreet divined in the landscape images and structures of being that other American writers would discover and explore. After pondering the act of contemplation, Bradstreet retells the first murder. Cain is depicted as the definitively anti-Christ figure, a cursed newborn enthroned in the lap of Eve (contra images of the theotokos): Here sits our grandame in retired place, And in her lap her bloody Cain new-born; The weeping imp oft looks her in the face, Bewails his unknown hap and fate forlorn; Stanza 15 tells the story [...]

The assertion that “Contemplations” is primarily concerned with the ascension of the soul may bump against prevailing notions. Some critics have said Bradstreet was more in love with the earth than heaven since the lines that directly address the idea of heaven often fall short: “too often merely traditionally rendered passages pale before some of the more deeply felt lyrical passages in praise of Phoebus and the things of earth”. Indeed, the poem begins with the rapture of the poet as she views nature: her gaze begins with the autumn leaves, then moves upward toward the sun: Thou as a bridegroom from thy chamber rushes, And as a strong man, joys to run a race; The morn doth usher thee with smiles and blushes; The Earth reflects her glances in thy face. Birds, insects, animals with vegative, Thy heat from death and dullness doth revive, And in the darksome womb [...]

When I was 4 or 5, my grandmother loved to ask me where I was from: “Pittsfield, Massachewits” I’d say. Like a sneeze. She took a special delight in my inability to grasp and order all the necessary phonemes. We moved from Massachusetts before I turned 10, before I really appreciated the important literary contributions that state had made to American literature. I do remember visiting Herman Melville’s estate and finding, appropriately enough, an arrowhead half-buried in the ground. Presumably another child lost it after buying it from the gift shop, but that object must’ve buried itself deeply in my psyche because I’ve felt compelled to recover my heritage. There’s Frost and Dickinson, of course; Moby-Dick is becoming a psychic and artistic anchor for me. And more recently, I am growing into deeper relationship with the “small triumphs” of Robert Francis. It’s part of this Massachusetts ressourcement, I suppose, that [...]

LANDSCAPE ____________________________________________ Tom Sleigh has won numerous awards, including the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters,The Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Guggenheim Foundation grant. He currently serves as director of Hunter College’s MFA program in Creative Writing. He is the recipient of the Anna-Maria Kellen Prize and Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin for Fall 2011. His most recent book is Army Cats.

The Master of Ceremonies Laydes and Gentilemen, welcome _____to a world made strange _____for us. ___________Allow this introduction: Rudolf is my name, on earth _______________________I was called Ruddy Bumpkin by my wife, also I was a train conductor, fancy that _______________________we’re being held here for a moment. ___________Look around— low ceiling, unnatural light like a dentist’s office, everyone puffy and unequal to their day. Smile at me neighbor, I’m your neighbor. HiHello. _______________________So. An extended allegory, everyone turn to the Gentileman or laydie to your right. This is the face for whom you are _____________________________responsible should the ship of god sink which it won’t. _____________________________Say Hihello. _______________________So. Imagine you are turned to the person on your right, Who says, “what the bloody fuck I’m late for work five times this week they’ve stopped believing it’s _______________________the train,” you can either acquiesce without committing _______________________to your saucy friend, or scold him [...]