Poetry

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]