Extract from My Ragged Company, #19 I asked Alice to ask me to marry her. She asked if I wanted to lick the painting on the hotel wall. That’s a poster, I said. Just a paper Hopper: a sad woman in a red teddy sat on a hotel bed reading a yellow letter: He’s not coming back. I asked for a kiss. She asked for a testament. Outside, I asked a man to point me to a lake or a liquor store. In Michigan, the man said, a liquids most obvious attribute is repression. But, he said, all taverns in Michigan share one trait: inside is someone that will make you feel at home. I followed his pointer. I walked across the street. I took the ferry. I climbed a hill and a tree and sat in a deer blind for a week until two hunters found me and took [...]
Bloodwork Some guy, bleeding, just beaten by hooded strangers on the late train, asks some girl, Miss S, a witness, the same question that lovers ask each other turning from mirrors, away, “How do I look?” & she, bystanding, replies “Frankly, you’re in a bad way.” She’d been thinking of the one, long gone, who got away, the one who’d taken himself from her & those days when she’d turn, adoring, to him. Amazing. (That’s what he used to say.) Thus S, on loss, ruminates. You can see what she’s getting at, can see where she’s heading. Your eyes have got that same telling ache & sanguine reverie. You too have once walked in twos, linked to another in the light rain…. But we all, now & then, walk alone, especially in the city of men, where most you meet are bled dry & broken, or have cashed in care [...]
A selection from Upriver It was a struggle switching over to a citrus flavored toothpaste, but Roosevelt loved her. The more nights he spent at Linda’s place, the less sense it made to keep brushing with just water. She never offered outright, but he used her toothbrush that already tasted mostly like oranges anyway. “We are not a regular couple,” she would say. “We have a structure.” This was true. They followed a very precise schedule. But Roosevelt’s nose was sensitive. He thought about toothpaste when they kissed at night and he should’ve been thinking about her. _____________________________________________________________ Sara Slaughter lives in New Orleans and is currently enrolled in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Honeyland Review, Method, and a collection celebrating what would have been the 100th birthday of Elizabeth Bishop. Related Posts Poem(s) of the Week: M.A. Vizsolyi [...]
Dead reckoning Late in the day and the sky is still white. When I look across the river I see another city. Even the sun is still so white. Yesterday I went walking with my hands in front of me and my lungs inside me I know I did. See, nothing has changed between us and the selves that arrived here. Sometimes the moon still appears, after a struggle. Other times it is obscured, is absent. The moon, beyond which are stars. People following them from another latitude. Yesterday I went walking and in front of me were hands. _______________________________________ Adam Tessier lives in Cambridge, where he manages a coffee shop. He has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Memorious, Linebreak, Remedy Quarterly, Anti-, and elsewhere. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Joseph Fasano The Melody Ascends Stepwise February 15, 2010 [...]
Alfred Corn’s new play Lowell’s Bedlam will be opening at Pentameters Theater in London, April 7th. The play runs until the Saturday before Easter. Set in the Autumn of 1949, during a period when Robert Lowell was being treated for bipolar illness, the play also features Elizabeth Bishop and Elizabeth Hardwick. It’s worth noting that Corn met all of these writers several times. Telephone: 02074353648 Related Posts Insomnia Hamlet and his (Public) Problems Seventeen Years Ago Last March: Elizabeth Bishop’s Grand Finale Poem of the Week: Mark Wunderlich Breaking Back into PoetryMarch 16, 2010
If you haven’t heard yet, Mark Strand has released a new book with called . In honor of this beautiful new book, THEthe will be giving away a signed copy of this limited edition chapbook. All you have to do to “enter” the drawing for this book is make a comment on any THEthe post (past, present, or future). Each comment is an entry to win, so feel free to go crazy (we like your comments anyhow!). Please observe the commenting guidelines; no spam or blatantly vapid comments, please. Please sign in with some form of contact information (via Facebook, Twitter, etc.) so that we can contact you if your name is drawn. Related Posts More Construction NotesOctober 14, 2010 Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe! Scattered Rhymes is Coming: Joseph Spece What’s Your Style Book of Choice? The Silver Book
I hate when poets are called brave. Gets on my nerves. Fearless is another term I find dubious. Poets win grants. They are professionals. Most poetry festivals are lamer and more sedate than Star Trek conventions. If I pick up a poetry book and see the words “brave” or “fearless” in any of the blurbs, I think twice about buying it. No one is brave or fearless if they live in the suburbs, have tenure, or inhabit parts of Manhattan that have been made safe by the police force. This is not brave. Being fearless in a poem is along the same lines as being an aggressive grandmother expressing road rage in an old Buick sedan. Spare me. Being “brave” in a poem is like those snide one liners people zing you with from the safety of a Facebook comment. But, sometimes, poets write poems that aren’t being considered for [...]
Etheridge Knight wrote some of the only haiku I can stand in the American idiom. In addition to that, his ear was impeccable, and he was liable to go just about anywhere in a poem so that he invigorates the tradition of the conversational lyric and does so by using mixed registers of speech while avoiding both the political correctness and formulaic “Non-academic” traditions of spoken word. The list in second part of this poem shows how a poet can still use cursing and invective to maximum rhythmical advantage. This is a list, worthy of Whitman. Knight is not an “unschooled poet.” His training is in the whole array of American speech from the reflective, almost introverted poet, to the raucous street preacher. “All Fucked Up” represents true spoken word–not a slam formula. Feeling Fucked Up by Etheridge Knight Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and [...]
Carolyn Kizer’s poetry pleases me in many of the same ways May Swenson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Alice Fulton please me: enormous intelligence and observation as a form of passion, as deep engagement with the thing made out of words. She is not interested in using the natural world to enter realms of spiritual transport. There is no fuzziness, no maudlin sense of the “sublime” clinging to her observation. This is her poem on seeing a Great Blue Heron. It is also a powerful tribute to her mother. She has an even better one on seeing a bat, and in that poem, her mother also figures as a partner in the event, but I would hope a reader enjoys this poem and goes hunting for the bat. Unlike Mary Oliver, she would never declare “you do not have to be good.” Her Heron, unlike Oliver’s goose is no excuse for a [...]
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 [...]
A song cycle of David Shapiro’s sonnets called Unwritten has been written by the great young composer Mohammed Fairouz and will be played at Carnegie at Recital Hall on March 21st. Word on the street is that David Shapiro himself may play the coda. Related Posts Poem of the Week: David Lehman Ur Poems: David Shapiro A Preface to a Blog: Auguries of Experience As If She Were a Symbol of Something Some David Schubert Poems You May Not Know
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 [...]
Poem in the Manner of Charles Bukowski You do what you want, I’ll do what I want, and we’ll see which one of us gets to the twenty-dollar window in time for the fourth race at Del Mar. On the goddamn radio that’s always playing in my bitch’s kitchen, I heard some East Coast big-shot author say he needs to jerk off before he can write. All is I can say is fuck that shit. I hate poets who beg you to like them because you feel sorry for them. Do not feel sorry for me. I won on Bitches’ Brew in the fourth and went home and drank a fifth of bourbon and got laid. ___________________________________________ David Lehman is the editor of The Oxford American Book of Poetry and series editor of . He teaches at The New School. A special thanks to for letting us use his photos [...]
Big Badness A dead CEO admonishes me to do what I love, which he can’t see me doing. I need only a clean place to lie around, to see a few decent things. You’re lucky if you have half of that, but which half. Also look up to see everything has gone a shade of purple which should only last a few minutes but goes on for an hour because of the clouds. And why is that, an equinox or its afterbirth staining everything some of the other words there are for purple. Go find them for me and keep maybe one for yourself, give them to me and invent more and I will acquire them, hand over the ones you were making and I will tell the world I invented them. They are mine (Lilac™, Violet™) and I will kill you to impress upon you that I can. ________________________________________ [...]
_______________________________________ M.A. Vizsolyi’s first book of poetry, The Lamp with Wings: Love Sonnets won The National Poetry Series, selected by Ilya Kaminsky, and is forthcoming in the fall 2011. He teaches ice hockey and ice skating lessons in Central Park, and lives in New York City with his wife, the poet, Margarita Delcheva. Related Posts “Via” by Amy Lawless Some David Schubert Poems You May Not Know Poem of the Week Doubleheader! Colie Hoffman & Maya Funaro How to Ransack a Poem for Parts Poem of the Week: Sharon Olds
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