Category: Poetry

Hook I tried to behave with my teaching assistant, with whom I was sleeping, as we laid out fresh worksheets and took positions front and back of a never-so-peaceful classroom. The kindergarteners knew before us, like a game of house, our sixteen inner-city children. Which of those lost boys or girls could be our Peter Pan that year, I mean, if I returned to the role of father Darling after a mostly unnoticed turn as the dancing pirate? Surely D—, if anyone, with whom she watched me slam my fists down in a moment of pure Hook. It should have been me, not him, the janitor helped drag down the hall while she took over, then sobbing in the office that it was me, not him, the devil made do bad things. ____________________________________ J.T. Welsch’s poems have appeared or will shortly appear in Stand, Boston Review, Manchester Review, Blackbox Manifold, [...]

Psalm for Third Base Fingers have their own prayers, often crossed, but also bunched in pockets for warmth or comfort: there, amidst the fumble-scratch of eager hands, there where verbs take root: touch, trace, fist. There in the back pew of a filled church with a skirt tented just-so, a boy’s fingertips graze inside, the sanctuary couched in beeswax-smoke. There, the salvation of dim light, brass candelabras holding their tarnished glow in the black flame just above the candlewick. It is there at the back of the chapel with the choir singing hallelujah and angels on walls shimmering fallen light that the boy receives what he expects from religion: fanfare, epiphany, movement. So it is there that the boy lingers, the edge of where he’s been before and what must come after: the present, what the gospel calls the kingdom: her lips dusting his earlobe, whispering, breathing, as if she [...]

“The artist is a receptacle of emotions come from no matter where: from the sky, the earth, a piece of paper, a passing figure, a cobweb. This is why one must not discriminate between things. There is no rank among them. One must take one’s good where one finds it.” Picasso wrote this well before Mary Ruefle started publishing books, but if his words could be an egg, Ruefle’s Selected Poems would hatch right out of it. Her speakers—obsessed both with beauty and with their inability to “attain a balance/ between important and unimportant things”— over and over fuse the world’s grandest abstractions and minutest details in efforts to find meaning somewhere in the middle. Naturally, with so many things to include, Ruefle’s poems jump around a lot from one place/time/feeling/speaker to another. In “Timberland,” we go from “Paul’s Fish Fry in Bennington, Vermont” to “the delta/ of the Pearl [...]

What do animals dream? Do they dream of past lives and unlived dreams unspeakably human or unimaginably bestial? Do they struggle to catch in their slumber what is too slippery for the fingers of day? Are there subtle nocturnal intimations to illuminate their undreaming hours? Are they haunted by specters of regret do they visit their dead in drowsy gratitude? Or are they revisited by their crimes transcribed in tantalizing hieroglyphs? Do they retrace the outline of their wounds or dream of transformation, instead? Do they tug at obstinate knots of inassimilable longings and thwarted strivings? Are there agitations, upheavals, or mutinies against their perceived selves or fate? Are they free of strengths and weaknesses peculiar to horse, deer, bird, goat, snake, lamb or lion? Are they ever neither animal nor human but creature and Being? Do they have holy moments of understanding in the very essence of their entity? [...]

It’s always a relief to me when I see a book published by somebody outside the “poetry ghetto.” Though I’m sure Troy Jollimore has been to his fair share of poetry workshops (who hasn’t?), he is (by trade?) a philosopher, teaching at California State-Chico. It might be wise, therefore, to keep Randall Jarrell’s words on Wallace Stevens (from Poetry and the Age) in mind as we approach Jollimore’s work: Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of a philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano….When the first thing that Stevens can find to say of the Supreme [...]

So I’m reading, and very much enjoying Ray Hammond’s Poetic Amusement, his masters thesis on the influence of po’biz amid writing programs on American poetry. When I read, I interact with a text, start scribbling my own argument for or against, maybe write a didactic sonnet, or trounce about my house looking for other books that seem pertinent. In chapter 4, Hammond writes about the muse, how the muses have been put on the shelf and replaced by workhop craft. I’m enjoying it because no one speaks about the primal condition of poetry being the ability to “receive” from outside one’s ego, and even one’s consciousness–to be stupid. Stupidity, in its old sense “stupere” means to be stupefied, stunned, left with your mouth agape, and, lo and behold, Hammond quotes Levertov on the original definition of Muse: To contemplate comes from ‘templum, temple, a place, a space for observation marked [...]

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 [...]

An encounter it would have been gripping to see: the 1875 reunion, in Stuttgart, of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, at the conclusion of the older poet’s two-year imprisonment in Belgium. (He had been convicted for firing on his lover and giving him a flesh wound in the wrist.) Verlaine told his friends that, as soon as he was released, he made his way to Germany, hoping he would be able to persuade the younger poet to resume their travels and adventures together. When they stood face to face again, did they cry, did they jump up and down, cackling with laughter? Or, if there were bitter reproaches, did those come more from Verlaine or from Rimbaud? Until time-travel is invented we won’t have answers because neither poet left a detailed record of the meeting, nor were there any witnesses. So much about relationships that crash and burn must always [...]

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 [...]

Neither a memoir nor a novel, The Poetry Lesson (Princeton UP, 2010) by Andrei Codrescu measures the speed of our psycho-poetic times. It seems we are moving faster and faster knowing less and less where. On the sheen of it, the book runs through the first day of an Intro to Poetry Writing class wherein Codrescu narrates his process of assigning “Ghost-Companion” poets to students according to the first letter of their last names. Underneath the glaze of this conceit, however, the book prods for lessons about the American Academy’s marketing of the imagination through creative writing classes. I pissed smugly on academia, which is a way of saying that I pissed on myself, which I do, regularly, to extinguish my pretensions. While I was peeing I didn’t think I was immortal, but felt something very much like it. It hurts me, it really does, to know so much and [...]

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 [...]

Cursivism, Will Hubbard’s slim, debut volume of prose poems published by Ugly Duckling Presse, begins with a simple piece of advice that may be one of the most challenging charges facing anyone who is trying to figure out how to live, “just let it happen.” Though the mother’s instruction refers to how to tend an orchid the speaker has wooed into blossom mid-winter, it also applies to everything and anything our lives might encompass. To live by that advice requires difficult virtues: restraint, patience, and faith. Hubbard’s poems exhibit all three. The poems that comprise Cursivism humbly speak at the same time as personal anecdotes, somber and revelatory reflections on the past, whimsical tales, and truths. These poems are modestly anthemic for members of Generation Y— those of us waking up to the fact that we’ve inherited a fraught world of questions that don’t have answers, and where many days [...]

If you’d told me that the ultimate line of a wonderful poem could be, simply, “Doctor Wong,” I would’ve looked at you skeptically. But that’s exactly the case in Matthew Rohrer’s latest collection, Destroyer and Preserver (Wave 2011). I both laughed and felt outfoxed by Rohrer’s nasty knuckleball wit when I read the last line of, “Marque Nùmero Dos.” My laughter elicited an is-there-something-wrong-with-you look from the woman next to me on the plane, but I cared about as much as the clouds outside. And Destroyer and Preserver is more than witty and strange. These unpretentious lyrics are deft expressions of where the personal meets the political, where the mundane meets the profound—documenting a multivalent poet’s quotidian as his nation wars abroad. Destroyer and Preserver shares many of the concerns of Rohrer’s earlier works. I was introduced to his poems some years back, when a mentor suggested I read his [...]

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 a language knows that there is a double hell: the effacement that transpires when one must “move on” from that place, or language, or person, and perhaps worse: the effacement that memory assures since to remember anything is to distort it, to make a sort of selected works out of that which once had full life and depth, and which breathed independent of one’s own consciousness. Kafka, speaking of writing, said: “the minute you write, ‘she opened a window’, you have already begun to lie.” Memory is lie, but it has an ethos, a virtue [...]