I. How can we define the philosophy of pragmatism? What is the relationship between the philosophy of pragmatism and the poetics of John Ashbery? Is there one? Ken McClelland cites Cornel West’s citation of C.I. Lewis as “being one of the best characterizations of pragmatism ever formulated” (Opening Truth 12). Lewis writes, Pragmatism could be characterized as the doctrine that all problems are at bottom problems of conduct, that all judgments are, implicitly, judgments of value, and that, as there can be ultimately no valid distinction of theoretical and practical, so there can be no final separation of questions of truth of any kind from questions of the justifiable ends of action. (qtd. in McClelland 12) McClelland goes on to comment that, “with the words, ‘the justifiable ends of action’ in mind, we clearly see that pragmatism’s philosophical impulse is inextricably tied to temporal consequences, with the idea that the [...]

Like I Said Okay, so it’s Sunday. I didn’t go to church. I’m an Irish Catholic, I know about sin, but I was tired and just didn’t feel like getting dressed. On Thursday night, I fell and broke a slat from the garden fence. My hip still hurts – the bruise is as big as my Yorkie’s head. That would have been enough, but this morning the vacuum coughed up a hairball and quit. The only food in the fridge is a bearded yogurt. The washing machine refuses to spin. There’s no clean underwear left, so I’m not wearing any. Like I said, I was tired; I didn’t feel like getting dressed, so I didn’t go to church and abdicated rights to all that grace. I put on a pair of dirty jeans, a dirty shirt, and sat outdoors all morning. I did nothing but talk to my dogs, watch [...]

So this morning I wake up, give my daughter a long bottle of formula (she is now able to wield the bottle on her own) and await my wife’s return from Dunkin Donuts. Yes. My wife has gone out to hunt. I am reading Across The Land And Water (Selected Poems, 1964-2001) of W.G.Sebald, Author of Austerlitz (that’s what’s on the cover). Austerlitz is a very trendy book among graduate students for I hear them dropping Austerlitz the way they dropped George Saunders or Anne Carson: long sentences I hear, like Henry James (only not)–German dude. So I am reading poems by the author of Austerlitz. That way, I can say to someone: “but have you read his poetry?” They will say “no… no I haven’t,” and then I can raise an eyebrow, give them a significant stare, and respond, “You must” and walk away, having avoided mentioning that I [...]

Things Warren loves: ______________________________________________ Warren Craghead III lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA with his wife and two daughters. See more at .

The two women in the adjacent garden, draped with thick woolens, braids hanging down from both sides of the skull, hitched together with a string between their shoulder blades. They pause their spade, their hoe, or their small hand trowel and admire a mating pair of Hoopoe birds, audaciously mohawked with tangerine and flashing zebra stripes, as the birds drill their beaks into the sheaves of a wooden shed. The garden stops. The women stop. I stop, though I don’t know if I was moving at all. And aside from the birds the only things that seem to move are the clouds, scraping their bottoms against jagged Himalayan teeth. For a moment it looks as if we are all characters playing out a scene in one great, gaping jaw of rock and sand. It looks like the world is trying to eat the sky. ___ At the airport there is [...]

Pictures of a Fireman Grandma said his eyes rose like moons above the rim of his glasses when he leaned over the table at the pool hall the first time they met, called every shot. I remember him descending from a cloud on a ladder of flames with a woman in his arms, clipped from the front page of the Newark Evening News and framed on their living room mantle. Or as he was in the photograph I found in an attic album of him tending register behind the bar of a speak-easy, his eyes dark, cheeks flushed, grinning back at the camera as if he owned the place. I see him seaside, sometimes, up to his knees in weekend surf, his white, button-down shirt flapped open like the wings of a Great Egret, fishing pole bowed, tip sparkling like a cufflink on a cloud as he tugs at the [...]

I have done physical labor in my life, and never found it harsh or unrewarding except when it was under the scrutiny of a manager (foremen, overseer, take your pick). They’re job was to make sure I was “doing it the right way,” or that I was doing it quickly, or that I was doing it both the right way and quickly (a contradiction in terms that causes almost all the heartbreak of blue collar life). It was never right enough or quick enough for my boss, even when it was right and quick. I am strong, but not well coordinated, and I am also slow to catch on to things. When it comes to anything in the physical world, I need to be stupid before I am smart. When it comes to piece work, this does not bode well. I am verbally intelligent, and that helped me get by [...]

Green Light In the dark, the green light glows from my father’s radio. Outside, rain, and the sound of rain under 18 wheels. Along the highway, the truckers speak to each other in long all night drawls of almost finished sentences. I think the voice of the midnight universe is always vaguely southern: West Virginia, North Carolina, Shiloh, Vicksburg, moving on up all the way to Cleveland, and down to some great swamp where dead cedars rise, where a Heron barely stirs. I am thinking how pain calcifies in the heart, how great cathedrals in the cave of someone’s closed eyes are being formed—drop by drop, on the lime stone walls of trout streams, in the caves of Kentucky, all the way through to Pennsylvania. Is a man alone, stretched out upon the pallet of his bed? Is he ever less than a landscape, an outcropping of rocks, voices, wires, [...]

In Caroline Knox’s nimble new collection Flemish, a poem entitled simply “They” begins: “They live in a mobile home/made of Adobe Caslon.” The elided antecedent here could very well be Knox’s poems; while maintaining a healthy awareness of themselves as constructed objects (“black and white graphic art,” Knox has called them), they simultaneously feel in constant, and deliriously unpredictable, motion. Vehicles, metaphoric, historical, or embroidered on pillows, abound in these poems. In “Harley Lyric”, Knox has somehow managed, with her characteristic wit, to conflate a medieval manuscript of miscellanea and the eponymous “chopper”—and with a tonal palette at once brassy and arcane. There is something playful, almost giddy, in these poems—they create the sense of setting out on a road trip, purposeless and hopeful. Flemish is Caroline Knox’s 8th poetry collection, her third from the excellent Wave Books. This year, six of her poems were included in the second edition [...]

I’d love to teach a course centered on The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy’s great novella cannot be studied in isolation from certain foundational texts standing at it were behind Ivan, and pushing him into the literary foreground. These are, but are by no means limited to, The Confessions of St Augustine and Rousseau, Tolstoy’s own tortured diaries, Paul’s Romans, Christ’s teachings on the world as opposed to the kingdom of God in the New Testament, and sundry Russian books and essays on the nature of the peasants, their aristocratic “fathers,” and this new dominant professional class to which Ivan belongs and which has neither loyalty to the land nor the simple faith of the peasant, and which has neither the refinement nor complicated decadence and aesthetic taste of the nobility. This “functionary class” is co-optive, incapable of originality, grafting onto its evil and mundane tree the native “shrewdness” and [...]

from Diary of Return August 8, 2002 I arrived below the 38th parallel. Everyone and every place I know are below the waist of a nation. Before I arrived, empire arrived, that is to say empire is great. I follow its geography. From a distance the waist below looks like any other small rural village of winding alleys and traditional tile-roofed houses surrounded by rice paddies, vegetable fields, and mountains. It reminded me of home, that is to say this is my home. Close up: clubs, restaurants, souvenir and clothing stores with signs in English, that is to say English has arrived before me and was here even before I had left. PAPA SAN, LOVE SHOP, POP’S, GOLDEN TAILOR, PAWN. I followed the signs and they led to one of the gates to Camp Stanley, a heliport, that is to say language is not be to believed but to be [...]

ONE Delhi is hell. It is hot. It hits one in the face like the exhaust pipe of a long-haul trailer spewing thick blackness into a pristine sky. It smells like ruin. The impression is delayed, of course, as the city puts one its best feet forward at first. The sparkling, new T3 at Indira Gandhi International—the second largest air terminal in the world, they point out with great pride—greets arrivals with four giant gold hands in lotus positions, and a shining, gleaming, blazing white expanse of an epic duty free. It all feels very proper and clean. But as one exits through the swish of sliding glass to a throbbing mass of hired drivers and calls for taxi, taxi, taxi, one first smells the flaming soot. The sweet burn of wood and diesel. The Delhi bonfire. And yet, the pulse races because this is it, the most foreign of [...]

I am not a secular poet, have never been a secular poet, and my work is a journey through both the imagery of my working class Irish Catholic background and my sense of the the incarnate word as Shema Mitzvah–the oneness of God within the act of love toward neighbor. First Shema: Hear O Israel, the lord, the lord is one. And you shall love the lord with all your mind and with all your heart and with all your strength and the Mitzvah is And the second commandment is like unto it: love your neighbor as yourself. All other commandments are contained within these two, the whole of the law, the spirit of the law. They are the ontology of my poems, and to truly enter my work, you must understand it in the context of Shema Mitzvah. I do not believe in the separation of faith and works, [...]

LOURDES Matthew is plain on the tongue and fleeting. Lourdes sits, instead of sex, on two blue crates, feeds herself blue lemons. Lips sodden, she bathes. She tastes the burn in the lantern of her chest. Lourdes snakes straight through the garden into her own bed opens her dignities and pleasures like guava white cotton underwear ___to the side open with pulque wet of cachaca without the sugarcane, & boys with biblical names make no appearance, especially Matthew, a worn worm soldier jamming its way into the core of a ripe melon. ____________________________________ Lisa Marie Basile comes from the bloodline of Giambattista Basile, the fairy-tale writer. She is a graduate of The New School’s MFA program. She is the author of (Brothel Books) and (Dancing Girl Press). Her chapbook, war/lock, is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press in 2014. She is the founding editor of Patasola Press, an assistant editor for [...]

There never were any hipsters in Elizabeth. Elizabeth is like the hell of hipsters. All the Brownstones were torn down and replaced by McDonalds. The DeCalvacante family had its headquarters there. The bars are old school, and too truly old school to be retro. Worst of all, the people are sincere and earnest and work a lot and are likely to have opinions they didn’t get by reading a little Chomsky, a little Said, and a lot of the Nation. It isn’t a university town unless you count Union County College and Kean, and these schools were colleges back when I am beginning this memoir. Elizabeth is the kind of place the Beats hated, though Allen Ginsberg is technically buried there–a couple blocks from where I lived on Monroe Avenue, forever rotting under the Budweiser sign (which is now owned by a foreign company that fucked over and locked out [...]