Zachary Pace

River 2 They thought themselves too much Acquainted with their seasonal Removal from the wet industry, Or rather placed beside it, Two picnickers blessed by them And losing the thought carefully Like a scientist in the river sent To be their blind guest As the center keeps forming Only to the situation That knows it and to no other Abstraction suggesting, “Things have gotten Too soon.” All things should be Sent back—except the hawks— Without us to the city. __________________________________________ Paul Legault is the author of The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010), The Other Poems (Fence, 2011) and The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s, forthcoming). He is co-editor of the translation journal, Telephone, and he works at the Academy of American Poets. PHOTO CREDIT: Lawrence Schwartzwald Related Posts Poem of the Week: Sharon Olds Poem of the Week: Adam Tessier Poem of the Week: Saeed Jones Poem of the Week: Christopher Stackhouse [...]

A On my entire obscene face there is something I’m trying to achieve. It is colorless. It is self-published. It is inner fatigue. It is so superfluous! It is part of an addiction I hate and depend on. It naturally enters into conversations. It will induce a kind of slow intuition. It will be sloppy and corrugated. It will smell pleasant. It will be animals playing on a farm. It will be completely alone. It will not be so bad. It will be missing out. It will have a vague sense of relief. It will be committing without action. It will be floating on the surface of everything. It will be an amorphous tedium. It will be sleep. It will be a party. It will be a good lunch and supper. It will be a whole day and night. It will be an indefinite field full of universal life. It [...]

Pissing What part of life is in the weirdness spreading illimitably around what fits? At face level, as he stood there, glaucous light was caught in the clear plastic shower curtain. This light came from the sun by an obscure but direct path through the airshaft. Look at it! The body of the slender man slouched forward like a bow. And his hand pinched his cock over the trouser notch. He hadn’t turned the light on, because, of course, he knew where the gleam-smudge of the commode cupped its shadowed pool. What a limp arrow and what an idle, slouching cupid! Whom does he hope to transpierce? He touched the plummeting fireflies of urine with his gaze and with thought. Would he ever choose to pass this moment if this were heaven where every action flows in simple purposefulness from desire? However absurd and embarrassing, he thought of love. All [...]

Tinsel Tinsel for M.C. A fool for love, an inner refugee, sees a peacock strutting in the birdhouse high on a branch and fanning the broadest, most articulated fan tail the fool for love has ever seen. “Come fly with me!” the fool calls to the peacock, but the bright bird keeps strutting up and down above the fool for love there on the ground. A blackbird comes and settles on his shoulder. His pecks are rough caresses as he asks him, “Why do you keep staring at that tree?” “Peacock!” the fool for love cries, but the blackbird caws back, “Fool! Since when do peacocks fly? Look around the birdhouse: see us towhees, wrens and jays and blackbirds flittering and swooping— what we always do for free.” All the fool can do is stare. His neck is permanently out of whack; he doesn’t care. But one fine day in [...]

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From the letters of John Keats: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” “I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the Moment.” “The faint conceptions I have of Poems to come brings the blood frequently into my forehead.” “Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbor, and thus by every germ of Spirit sucking the Sap from mould ethereal every human might become great. and Humanity instead of being a wide heath of Fuse and Briars with here and there a remote Oak or Pine, [...]

HOMOSEXUALITY by Frank O’Hara So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping our mouths shut? as if we’d been pierced by a glance! The song of an old cow is not more full of judgement than the vapors which escape one’s soul when one is sick; so I pull the shadows around me like a puff and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment of a very long opera, and then we are off! without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet will touch the earth again, let alone “very soon.” It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate. I start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear to my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can in the rain. It’s wonderful to admire oneself with complete candor; tallying up the merits of each of the latrines. [...]

Eros, by H.D. I. Where is he taking us now that he has turned back? Where will this take us, this fever, spreading into light? Nothing we have ever felt, nothing we have dreamt, or conjured in the night or fashioned in loneliness, can equal this. Where is he taking us, Eros, now that he has turned back? II. Keep love and he wings with his bow, up, mocking us, keep love and he taunts us and escapes. Keep love and he sways apart in another world, outdistancing us. Keep love and he mocks, ah, bitter and sweet, your sweetness is more cruel that your hurt. Honey and salt, fire burst from the rocks to meet fire spilt from Hesperus. Fire darted aloft and met fire, and in that moment love entered us. IV. Could Eros be kept, he was prisoned love since and sick with imprisonment, could Eros be [...]

To honor the first day of National Poetry Month, I want to share this poem by Bill Wadsworth — the progenitor of NPM, launched in 1996. Bill is an extraordinary writer, advocate and teacher of poetry — I’m profoundly grateful for the work he’s done and continues to do. For more information about Bill, visit http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1650 and for more information about NPM: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/41 Read “The River Twice” as three poems: the indented lines first, the italicized lines second, and together for an astonishing whole. This first appeared in Purchase College’s The Submission magazine, Spring 2008, edited by Natalie Eilbert. Related Posts WHAT’S YOUR IDEA OF A GOOD TIME? The Tenth Muse with John Ashbery: 92nd Y, Monday, 8pm Three Poems and an Interview with Ben Mirov Sometimes when I happy get The Super Happy Fun Poem Challenge of the Day in Three Steps

Apologies for the pseudo self-promotion — if you’re free this evening, 8pm, come to CPR – Center for Performance Research, 361 Manhattan Ave (Brooklyn) for Projection: featuring Star Black, Stephen Motika, Brenda Shaughnessy and Danniel Schoonebeek

Late again. I’m at work, greedily eating the seeds of the last pomegranate in Manhattan (so far as I’ve checked below 14th St) and I bid a wistful farewell to pomegranate season. And naturally, I’m thinking about Persephone (who paid dearly for my lunch) and all this leads me here: Pomegranate Louise Glück First he gave me his heart. It was red fruit containing many seeds, the skin leathery, unlikely. I preferred to starve, bearing out my training. Then he said Behold how the world looks, minding your mother. I peered under his arm: What had she done with color & odor? Whereupon he said Now there is a woman who loves with a vengeance, adding Consider she is in her element: the trees turning to her, whole villages going under although in hell the bushes are still burning with pomegranates. At which he cut one open & began to [...]

Congrats to Rae Armatrout, whose book VERSED won the 2010 NBCC Award. Here’s her poem “Guess”: 1 The jacaranda, for instance, is beautiful but not serious. That much I can guess. And that the view is softened by curtains. That the present moment is an exception, is the queen bee a hive serves, or else an orphan. 2 So the jacaranda is foreign and extravagant. It gestures in the distance. Between there and here you ask what game we should play next week. So we’ll be alive next week, continuing what you may or may not mean to be an impossible flirtation …and props to the brilliant and charming finalist Doug Powell, whose Wednesday night reading of “corydon & alexis” and “corydon & alexis redux” made me weep: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178536 Related Posts No related photos.

Forgot to post yesterday. To compensate, I am typing a poem “by heart”—you may know it already, by Ms Jorie Graham… THE WAY THINGS WORK is by admitting or opening away. This is the simplest form of current: Blue moving through blue; blue through purple; the objects of desire opening upon themselves without us; the objects of faith. The way things work is by solution, resistence lessened or increased and taken advantage of. The way things work is that we finally believe they are there, common and able to illustrate themselves. Wheel, kinetic flow, rising and falling water, ingots, levers and keys, I believe in you, cylinder lock, pully, lifting tackle and crane lift your small head— I believe in you— your head is the horizon to my hand. I believe forever in the hooks. The way things work is that eventually something catches. Related Posts Tangent February 17, 2010 [...]

When I’m blocked, blank, speechless, I fill the silence by internalizing a poem. I pick one that I know has something to teach me—some diction or rhythm that, once ingrained, might knock me free. I don’t think “memorization” is an accurate term for this practice. I prefer to call it learning by heart. It has little to do with rote remembering, and much to do with the commitment to know, invoke, embody the poem. I borrowed the idea from Kim Rosen, whose book SAVED BY A POEM illustrates the difference between using the mind and using the heart in relation to reading and learning poetry—how poetry affects us on both cellular and spiritual levels. “The healing did not come through writing poems or even through reading them. It came when I discovered that taking a poem I loved deeply into my life and speaking it aloud caused a profound integration [...]

This month marks the 47th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s passing, and my admiration grows more intense by the day—she is my touchstone, my first and last, my desert-island poet. I marvel at what she would’ve written had she lived longer, as each poem grows richer in chronological order. Below: excerpts from an interview with Peter Orr, recorded in 1962, wherein Plath is wonderfully lucid and charming; candidly speaking about a poet’s life and work, the inextricability of the two. We’re extremely lucky to have access to this recording (and other brilliant videopoems!) here: I think my poems come immediately out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have—but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most [...]