From the category archives:

Memoir

On Poetry and Loss, Part 2

by Joe Weil May 10, 2011 Memoir

This entry is part of a series, Poetry and Loss» , Poetry and Loss» , Poetry and Loss» The poet who saved my life never existed for me in his native language. He died fifteen years before I was born. His name is Miguel Hernandez, and he will never be as well known in English [...]

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On Poetry and Loss

by Joe Weil April 1, 2011 Memoir

I think of all the human emotions that call for the gravitas of form, loss, grief, and outrage need it most. In the case of Paul Celan, the complete break down of syntax and logical priority in his poetry was, chiefly, a formal necessity rooted in the murder of his people. He was writing in [...]

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The Book Bag

by Joe Weil March 15, 2011 Memoir

I still have my 4th grade book bag. Alone, at five in the morning, I picked the rusted lock with a paper clip, and discovered the 10-year-old Joe Weil’s first literary efforts, all crumpled up, in my terrible hand writing, but the meters of the poems were perfect. I remembered using that bag as a [...]

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Terms, Truth, Sun Sparrows: A Very Important Lesson from My Father

by Joe Weil March 1, 2011 Academia

I received a very important lesson from my father. We were driving around in the part of New Jersey he grew up in–a once rural area called Chester that was now suburban. He was sad because the street he had lived on so many years before was much smaller in reality than in memory and [...]

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Ur Poems: Sarah V. Schweig

by Sarah V. Schweig February 25, 2011 Memoir

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 [...]

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Meditation on Milosz

by Joe Weil February 1, 2011 Memoir
Poetry Fix, Episode 17: Milosz

I have a copy of Milosz’ Facing The River, which is translated both by the author and a poet I greatly admire, Robert Hass. In it, there is a wonderful and spiritual dance between memory and effacement, and, yes the effacement of memory, for anyone who has ever lost a person, or a country, or [...]

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Meditation on Apollinaire

by Joe Weil January 12, 2011 Memoir

The history of my reading life (and I consider it a life, somewhat independent of my so-called “real” life) has been littered with strange and utterly intuitive encounters with what now seem, in retrospect, the very things I needed. And so, when I had just turned fourteen, and was well-built and morose, and spent long [...]

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The Bookshelf

by Daniel Silliman January 4, 2011 Memoir

When I die, I want to be buried under the ground under the floor of a library. I want the musty smell of turned-over pages to seep down through the wood floor, through where the wood turns black around the nails. I want to dream of ink, through the stone-scattered earth and a plain pine [...]

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The other thing grammar is good for

by Daniel Silliman January 1, 2011 Language
What’s Your Style Book of Choice?

Grammar didn’t come natural to me. The first time, when I learned there was such a thing as grammar, when we were introduced — like, “Daniel, meet grammar,” “Grammar, Daniel” — things did not go smoothly. It was more like sliding bare-bottomed down a sandpaper hill. I was in first grade, and we had “writing [...]

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Portland

by Stuart Krimko March 25, 2010 Biography

I’m sitting up in bed, or on the couch, as it were, where I have been trying to sleep off the slew of vodka-and-tonics I downed last night at our reading here in Portland. Shawn Vandor, whose Fire at the end of the rainbow was just , and I read at . Happily I had [...]

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Nothing to say

by Stuart Krimko February 25, 2010 Memoir

I have nothing to say today, or nothing specific, only miscellany, no fashion thing has occurred to me. Here you have an image of Ferula scorodosma, the plant whose dried sap is used to make , a rather pungent spice. I received a packet of asafoetida in a box of spices given to me as [...]

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Spam Folder Amateur Gemology

by Evan Hansen February 21, 2010 Memoir

I don’t much care for flarfing, spoetry, or any of the pedantic ballyhoo and giggling that attend these “avant-garde” or rather more absurd, “post-avant-garde” little poetry-world eddies, but I am interested in the arrival of a message in my “Spam” folder that does not clearly connect to a commercial aim—text that is literary, in some [...]

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Tangent

by Joe Weil February 17, 2010 Memoir

On fourth of July, alone in my kitchen and the sound of distant fireworks. I drink cheap Merlot, watch the dark break and enter through the windows. I am all over the Internet, but would rather be all over someone else: a tangent. A tanager. Today, by the river I saw a scarlet tanager. Had [...]

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