Sarah V. Schweig

IN A FAMILIAR CITY where the grass and the gravel tic-tic-tic on the pavement, the morning sprinters, or on the mountain where there are no trees, or just one, grown light and thinned out of the rock: there might as well be music. There might as well be a certain resting sky, and a picnic to which we are invited. There is plenty of room. The flowerboxes are full of ice. At home, where the loss has always already happened, and the birds have only just come back, the trouble and clench of your fingers are irretrievable in the room’s studio-bright light. There are onlookers: white dress left over a door. Day-moon, hole in the sky’s blue body-armor. How small the road seems in comparison, the lean starts of redbuds spiked up the drive. _______________________________________________ Brittany Perham’s recent work may be found in TriQuarterly, Lo-Ball, Linebreak, and Drunken Boat. Her [...]

Blue Note Because there is only interval quiet, the impossibility of silence even after midnight, I am reaching for a distant tone: a single word, a sum of melody and rhythm in their absence. Clouds with glowing edges suggest extension. Inaudible dust and moths hovering around the floodlight offer suspension. If I say sound alone comprises song, which supposes location, the committee of crickets asserts intention. Great jazz only happens in hard-hitting cities, another era. Even minor sidemen knew that to build a ballad you must shape heartbreak, mimic the ostinato of heart-pump and bloodflow, know when to release a slow brushstroke across the snare drum. When to surrender a breath. Night air streams in place of daylight. A new variation of tired smells— mown grass, a neighbor’s faint cigarette, my perspiration—insists recollection. Not everyone raised here stays. X has not called in eighteen weeks. It’s perfectly fine to be [...]

Known Quantity So it turns out you want ____________to know nothing ______and it frightens me. It means you must ________know enough already. For example, you must _______know I’m calibrated ________________________to sit stiff with my hands in my lap like flowers ______meant for someone who’s just done ____a tremendous job. Someone’s just done a dance _________with all of her strong arms and legs in the air. ________________Someone’s just done _____a big trombone solo. Someone puts her nose ____________to the flowers and in her excitement ______forgets to breathe in. What did he bring you? ____________someone asks. ____They smell lovely, she says ___________instead of roses. There are flowers _______it’s possible not to be wrong about. Their smell. ___The way they sit ___________doing nothing in plastic in your hands. __________________________________________ Laura Eve Engel’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, LIT, Cincinnati Review, Cream City Review and elsewhere. [Spoiler Alert], a [...]

Love-Busker I’ve got an ugly, but I’ll never tell, how pretty your please. I’ve got a screw tight, and wheels for wheels, and an *. I’ve got a real good thing, going, so pardon my by- your-leave. A way of opening ah and putting me under. Over and out. I’ve got muscles in there, somewhere. A tooth that won’t grow in. Spit whistle, thumper finger, tin can clang I’m your one man band. A memory of lapses. A good cold. A winterized grin. My boutique hard-sell soft-core will pink you in. It’s rolled-gold bold. If you want love in a king-size bed beware my disease: symptoms: catchall goodwill and a right knee jitter. __________________________________________ Peter Kline‘s poetry has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, Poetry, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2010 Morton Marr Prize from the Southwest Review, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford [...]

This entry is part of a series, Ur Poems» The first poem I ever loved was The Raven. Specifically, one line from the poem haunted me when I was young, and still does: “The silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.” Writers today might say that the line isn’t a very good one, now that it has become the fashion of writing workshops to balk at any overuse of adjectives. But in this line the words used to describe this minute detail suggest that the mind perceiving the rustling curtain (the mind that is obsessed by the loss of Lenore) is frantic to most accurately describe and interpret the fleeting details of his life. A world that is indifferent to our sorrows and our ecstasies produces these details, but we can’t help but infuse them with our own meanings. These details are what the mind attaches itself to, are [...]

“Whatever it was I had to say,” Charles Wright writes on the first page of Littlefoot (FSG 2007), “I’ve said it.” Two years later, in 2009, Sestets, his most recent book, came out. “Instead of going over poems today,” Charles said one day a few years ago as our small, always-awestruck-in-the-presence-of-Charles-Wright class gathered around a seminar table at the University of Virginia, “I’m gonna read you some John Cage.” He then began to read John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing.” “I am here,” he said, “and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment. What we re-quire is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.” Thank god he does. If he had nothing to say at the beginning of Littlefoot, a beautiful book-length poem, then he certainly had much more nothing to say in [...]

(The elderly novelist to whom this letter is addressed won his reputation in the middle of the century and was thus a survivor of the Golden Age of Russian literature. He had written to young Chekhov, with whom he was not acquainted, hailing him as the outstanding writer of his generation and urging him to undertake a serious piece of work that would demand time and thought, even if it meant going hungry.) Moscow, March 28, 1886 Your letter, my kind, ardently beloved bringer of good tidings, struck me like a thunderbolt. I nearly cried, I got all excited, and now i feel that your message has left a deep mark on my soul. As you have been kind to my youth, so may God succor your old age. For my part, I can find neither words nor deeds with which to thank you. You know with what eyes ordinary [...]

The time has come to reveal (I think) the source (for those who don’t already know) of The The Poetry’s name, namely, “The Man on the Dump” by Wallace Stevens. is a link to the full text. Considering this, I wrote a little blurb to explain what this virtual forum is/might be. Here that is: ~ The The Poetry Blog takes its name from Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man on the Dump,” which ends with a question and an answer: “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.” The The is a forum for ideas on poetry and the poetic aspects of fiction, non-fiction, music, visual art, film, and “the things / That are on the dump (azaleas and so on) / And those that will be (azaleas and so on).” Our contributors are writers, readers, artists, critics and so on. Our readers are writers, readers, artists, [...]

A. People talking without speaking People hearing without listening People writing songs that voices never share… -Paul Simon Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds…. -Vladimir Nabokov To my wife Anne, without whose silence this book never would have been written. -Philip K. Dick, dedication page from The Man in the High Castle B. If you place two or more people in a lobby, they will produce words that string together discussions regarding recent changes in weather. If you put one person in a lobby, he or she will hum a tune no one–not even he or she–knows, atonally and incessantly. C. This is a cat named Silence. He meows at the door as I write this. Silence on "Silence" by John Cage In the Brooklyn apartment where Silence lives, a man came to look at a room for [...]

Before I post my regularly scheduled post, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I give you an excerpt from James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and the salmonpink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man’s voice singing. He stood still in [...]

Life consists of propositions about life. —Wallace Stevens I. A certain esteemed professor requires that those enrolled in his poetry workshop meet with him in his downtown studio apartment, right off Washington Square. Once inside, the student hands over a few poems and watches the professor–clipboard in one hand, red pen in the other–scrutinize every word of every line of every stanza of each poem. At the end of the hour, the student will rise from the couch, the professor will rise from his chair, a small ancient French bulldog that has since settled, drooled and snored on either available lap (usually the student’s) will remove himself begrudgingly and resituate his arthritic corporeal freight on the floor, and fall back asleep. The student receives his or her scarred poems, exits the apartment, takes the elevator downstairs, crosses the courtyard, goes through a stone tunnel, and passes through the tall iron [...]

(Disclaimer: Ok, yes. This is a post about pens. But bear with me—I actually do have an idea here.) I found my favorite pen at home—my mother’s house in Northern Virginia. The townhouse is a small one, and is filled with thirteen years worth of the kind of stuff a family with an inclination toward a breed of boredom that stems from a general suspicion that life is meaningless accumulates when it stays in one place for long enough: Construction paper, watercolor paper, canvases, palettes, coloring books, markers, crayons, colored pencils, pastels, gauche, acrylics, water-soluble oils, oils. A flute, a piccolo, three recorders, an Irish penny whistle, a Jew’s harp, a harmonica, a kazoo or two, an old guitar. Knitting projects, beading projects, thread, needles, needlepoint, thimbles, embroidery floss of all colors, clay. Two chessboards, Scrabble, Perquacky, Yahtzee, Sorry, Past Lives, Life. The house is also full of exhausted pens. [...]

PROFESSOR: Mary Ann, would you mind reading your poem aloud so that we can hear it in your own voice? MARY ANN: Absolutely. Ahem. Who’s the black private dick That’s a sex machine to all the chicks? SHAFT! Ya damn right! Who is the man that would risk his neck For his brother man? SHAFT! Can you dig it? Who’s the cat that won’t cop out When there’s danger all about? SHAFT! Right On! They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother SHUT YOUR MOUTH! I’m talkin’ ’bout Shaft. THEN WE CAN DIG IT! He’s a complicated man But no one understands him but his woman JOHN SHAFT! PROFESSOR: Thank you, Mary Ann. Ok, class, let’s start with the things we like. Then we’ll move on to the things we think could be improved. [Long pause.] AMERICAN STUDIES MAJOR [pensively]: I really appreciate how the poem argues with itself, [...]

1) Read the following poem by James Wright: Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home. Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love. Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies. 2) Extricate yourself from the puddle of tears into which you have crumbled. 3) Can you think of another poem that uses a word like “therefore” as brilliantly as this one does?

“Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory ~ Miss Romano’s fourth grade class was gathered on the rough green carpeting listening to a small blonde girl with a turned up nose recite from memory “I Hate Homework” by Shel Silverstein. The year was 1993. The place was Floris Elementary in Northern Virginia. I was dressed entirely in black. As the little cherub was finishing, “Homework oh homework you’re last on my list. / I simply don’t see why you even exist,” I stood up, indicating my readiness to Romano with the stoicism of a samurai readying for battle. The cherub finished. The class applauded mechanically and hushed. “Yes, Sarah? You’re ready?” “Yes,” I said to Romano, that pedagogical twerp, “I am ready.” I made my way through the clustered crowd of quiet cross-legged tots. As I [...]