dearest, they told me a surgeon sat down in the hospital morgue next to your body. He yelled at the aide to get out. His two sons had been your students. –me, too, little-knowing– Anyhow. I’m always, my young fathers, out in the air, loving you. Water to water. ____________________________________________ Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book,Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, just out from Copper Canyon Press. Her previous collection, Little Boat was published by Wesleyan in 2007. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Joan Larkin Poem of the Week: Sharon Olds [...]
Michael Klein
Once I Walked Out Once I walked out and the world rushed to my side. The willows bent their willowy necks, tossed green hair hugely. The hawk cried by the well. The crows kept counting their kind. Once I walked out and the sheep bleated with sensitivity, touched black muzzles to the grass. I was followed by dogs, by flies, by horses both curious and spiteful. The field of beans worked its sums under green, the corn licked the air to haze. I said goodbye to the house with its sagging porch, attic hung with bats. Goodbye braided rug, rabbit hutch, corn popper, copper tub . The green world greened around me— Virginia creeper, crown vetch, thistle, mullein, sumac. I was full in my limbs, my laugh, pinkish skin. I swung my arms, pulled air into lungs— pine pollen, dust mote, mold spore, atomized dew, bright wheel of flame twisting [...]
Photo Everyone in it dead now––Dad, three, in a skirt––and I see her again, the unnamed woman. She is me. No one to introduce us: Hello, Me. Unruly eyebrow woman, eyes sepia but blue––they must be; hair pulled slant, frame bent lensward, skeptical mouth smiling––I know you. How did you leash your mind, when you looked through the small window or stared through water at your veined hand? _______________________________________ Joan Larkin’s most recent collection, My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press) received the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. She teaches in Drew University’s Low-Residency MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.
James Schuyler is back from the dead with the lovely “Other Flowers” a posthumous book of his unpublished, uncollected poems. Everything I have come to know and love about Schuyler’s eye and heart is here in generous supply. The poems are – like so many of the poems published in his lifetime – made from a kind of brilliance disguised as innocence; a sadness disguised as joy. They feel closer to jazz and painting than to another kind of poetry. And, like they are peculiarly of their own time: still timeless as any poetry this indelible (though more in the sense of memorable than something held down or restricted by an era), but they are also poems that feel (somewhat like Frank O’Hara, Joe Brainard and, later, Frank Bidart) almost immediately nostalgic. The subject matter here is still the same as it’s always been: New York, adventures in intimacy, pop [...]
Packing Her Things And I could nearly stand it—the stained blouses; the nubs of drying lipsticks with their botched nose jobs; the undershirts; the bras; the slips; the books. I packed them away, like a dutiful child. I did it dry-eyed, thinking, I could spend a day like this in hell, and then at the back of the closet I found her cache of gift bags—pretty foil bags; tiny starred ones; slick big bags with cabbage roses— the way we both squirrel them away. I never knew, the way I cried when I saw her paintings for the first time, or her secret collection of beaded purses. Which part of the soul is handed down? Which part is its own? Then I sank down on the bed and howled. I wept like an orphaned child. ___________________________________________ Liz Rosenberg is the author of the novel Home Repair and five books of [...]
~ The way I see it, history as a subject reads best when it is both documented and re-imagined (In Cold Blood, Ragtime, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men come immediately to mind); when a literary revelation emerges as a result of source material from the scene and from the bigger world get all mixed up. Artistic freedom applied to the narrative of seeing the world gives historical events a kind of literary sense beyond the mere recording of something that happened in time. By nature, history is haphazard and at its core, personal. And I can’t think of any American poet who knows that fact as deeply and successfully as C.D. Wright who has, in a number of books, combined poetry with other kinds of writing to make a history about prisoners in Louisiana (One Big Self: An Investigation a collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster), or America’s relationship with [...]
Almost every poem in Matthew Zapruder’s third book, Come On All You Ghosts (a statement that is both joke and plea) starts with the word today or implies it with a declaration involving an observation almost generic in sound and meaning: “Today a ladybug flew through the window. I was reading” “Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway….” “I woke this morning to the sound of a little voice” “Sometime around 11 p.m. the you I was thinking of” “Today I read about the factory” “This morning I rode my gray metal bike” “Today I have the feeling that no matter” “Today I am going to pick you up at the beige airport” Of course, that recurring intention of today gets predictable after a while, but Zapruder uses it to compose poems that sound like what the love child of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara [...]