Poetry Blog Editors

Listen to Joe Weil’s album of original poetry and music, recorded with the help of . Related Posts As If She Were a Symbol of Something Adam Fitzgerald’s “Life of Gorgias” Incantations: Michael S. Harper, A Love Supreme that gum you like is going to come back in style Briefly remembering

Micah Towery will be reading his work with at on Friday, November 26, 8-10pm. . Michael Klein’s New Poetry Book, Upcoming Readings ¿What Where? Poetry Series Things to Know, Celebrate, Cherish: James Tate, Housing Works, 7pm tagged as british columbia, langley, Micah Towery, poetry reading, Vancouver, water shed arts cafe, [spaces]

Related Posts Poetry Fix Episode 1: Robert Hass.June 25, 2010

for David Shapiro I PARITY Underneath the garden, loose stars stapled to ribbed snail shells in octaves of sky, the revised mistranslation of a black pool expects what an inveterate tuba suggests: a broken interflow inhabiting the honeysuckle– but diction is unlivable, a plastic replica stuck in low tides, the snow’s psyche nearby, and the pool, its live-in help, third-persons the loud night, its open mouth an analogy of vowels… Such fierce quantums ingest roman à clefs, gondolas drifting on changed names below rows of dead windows. Oh, the globe’s pallor is so themelessly narrow, its doors glamorous and blind. Messy cement, set by geometrics, cannot fix it, though music’s lost paragraph can. II EVERYBODY HATES LOVE… its pale-colored loops. mental and spiritual, its woeful exaggerations primitive as tequila resonated through salt in vacuums invented by thieves– lorry lingo, islets, milkweed– and, yet, its purple-and-silver drivers get a groom’s reprieve, [...]

Genevieve Burger-Weiser’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Boston Review, Western Humanities Review, Washington Square Review and Juked. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Related Posts “Via” by Amy Lawless April 2, 2010 “The Sweetness of Herbert” by Stuart Krimko February 18, 2010 Partial board meeting April 8, 2010 {insert shrug} February 13, 2010 “Concerto Grosso” […]

PART 1 PART 2 Related Posts Joe Weil on Hecht’s “A Hill”

It’s been a year since that goddamned horse died and I have yet to pick up the pieces. It brought me water on down that road. It took the tarp with buck’d teeth and made a tent by lifting it over the low branches of a nearby tree. It’s been a year since that goddamned horse died and I’ve used all the lessons he taught me during our time together braving the elements. My right arm has burned off from the sun’s radiation and I can no longer call out at night in pain like I used to. It’s been a year since that goddamned horse died from swallowing the last of the Brita filters. And even if having clean water did nothing it made me feel safe, like we were able to improve our own condition. It’s been a year since that goddamned horse died. Triple crown I lost [...]

Easier Than Learning Klingon Jason Crane reviews John Gallaher’s Map of the Folded World In the realm of wrong answers, someone always has the radio on. – “I Will Sing the Monster to Sleep, & He Will Need Me” ~ I’ve been watching the middle seasons of Stargate SG-1 again. If you’ve never seen the show, the premise is that there are Stargates that allow instant travel between planets. You step into one and step out into a completely different landscape. To get around the problem of having to invent new languages for every race of aliens encountered, the producers cut the knot this way: They explained that a particular race of evil aliens had captured many humans from earth and sprinkled them throughout the galaxy to use as slaves. So most of the folks you encounter are human. And most of them speak English, albeit with some interesting variations [...]

Dear an hour north the trees are already shuttered leaves whip my face and the lake is lashed to whitewash while back home our initials grow dim erosion smoothes cement and names and your lover writes me letters detailing your predilections in colored pencils asking for friendship I suppose she does you well out here in the forest the season is brewing and no one minds the strange accent the new girl wears around her neck with a cross our senses shatter on punctuation and dropped Roman vowels streetlights and shadows follow sirens deep into the maze of named streets while here a fox has been eating chickens one by one in the skeleton night where once a shiv of moon grew flat on our lake while snow fell and held the light Related Posts Insomnia “Via” by Amy Lawless Could Eros be kept Tangent Writing Prompt Patter Read More [...]

Stomach Teeth remain but lips do not. A flattened pouch filled With a jackal-headed god’s Crumbs, a steady and tasteless Nourishing, until again the Lips burn, hungry for fowl In the infinite field of reeds. Lungs Tree dismantled. One half On top the other, losing pink Quickly. A baboon’s snout Blows the new air of a god Inside and during the rise Twin sponge-roots relearn To expand, contract, expand. Intestines The longest road of the body Is watched by a hawk-faced god Who flies the Nile’s length In two wing-beats, collects Water in his beak and returns The river’s still blue coolness To the driest coil of flesh. Liver The usefulness of what’s left Behind—blessed by the hands of A god with a human face, wide-eyed And mindful. Four parts, four winds Stilled, the kind of silence needed To end and begin. To make venom Essential, to warm again the [...]

In a photograph of my father’s Rhode Island, His home describes itself in tactile, sculptural terms. A well looms. Once, I stared the photo down Till I could picture it—till the clapboard And shingles lay like any focused thought Against a pure white backdrop. Now It was an idealized beauty treated as a vision, But an abstraction unquiet in its given body— Insistant, puritanical & aware of its materials And heft—stolid and wooden. The roof joists Turn up, but return earthward decisively Like a check-mark upside-down. We staked it out when I first saw New England. My father pointed, Look at the well, it’s gone. Alexander Landfair lives on Manhattan, where he is the associate poetry editor of Narrative Magazine. He was recently a Finalist for Poetry’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship.

I sit with my head in the meadow and compare it to the stones In my biography I own a home I associate my home with pleasant feelings In my biography I am very sleepy I go sit on a stump and a log Sometimes for days I am moving I weep all night for my child In my biography epaulets grow in sorrow I braided them myself the golden worms And I am a horse owner I own a horse In my biography we are an island Food arrives and news and ammunition Very slowly I move to the cellar What I have buried there I still adore Heather Christle is the author of The Difficult Farm (). She grew up in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and now lives in Atlanta. More information is at .

Check it out. Similar to the popularity of “the body” in poetry today, the idea of “incarnational ______” (fill in the blank) is quite hot in Christian theology as well.

Poetry Blog is looking for experienced book reviewers to blog about new contemporary poetry titles. Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be updating our review copies list from national poetry presses. If you’re interested in writing a review, write us an email and let us know. [email protected] Currently, up for grabs: CHRISTOPHER SUNSET, Geoffrey Nutter, 2010 SELECTED POEMS, Dara Wier, 2009 SUNNY WEDNESDAY, Noelle Kocot, 2009 Related posts: “The Sweetness of Herbert” by Stuart Krimko Three Poems and an Interview with Ben Mirov better late Some Books on My Mind, or {Potential} Purchases of Imperishables Golden Splinter

Interview Part 1: Interview Part 2: A HILL | by Anthony Hecht In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur, I had a vision once – though you understand It was nothing at all like Dante’s, or the visions of saints, And perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some friends, Picking my way through a warm sunlit piazza In the early morning. A clear fretwork of shadows From huge umbrellas littered the pavement and made A sort of lucent shallows in which was moored A small navy of carts. Books, coins, old maps, Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints Were all on sale. The colors and noise Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation, So that even the bargaining Rose to the ear like a voluble godliness. And then, where it happened, the noises suddenly stopped, And it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved And [...]