Cassette Sonnet You gaze through a little window at brown wound around two circles and with a pen, straighten curlicues. A circle shrinks as a circle grows a half-drawn curtain in a rectangle. Fading names, epitaphs, hits. Dirty heads and the diva quits. All wow and flutter, the lyrics are mangled, spilling their guts which [...]
Mother puts on my lipstick standing behind me, dragging the lipstick across my lips as if they were her own. Her free hand steadies my face. It is the red of her nails I want on my mouth, the nails so lacquered they catch the flash of my camera and hold it. Mother puts on [...]
Empire Five winters stone has kept my fingers agile Reaching into coat’s warm pocket hand navigates ancient Plovdiv in a piece of gravel—weather’s shrapnel— as my old coat’s wool weaves heat into my skin All this stone’s patient indifference observes in press of passing seasons All this discarded time reflected in petroglyph’s striation as now [...]
Paul Breslin, in his introduction to The Psycho-Political Muse, outlines the psychological theories influencing the radical poetry of the 1950s and 60s. Finding that the psyche is culturally conditioned, recent psychological theories found that neurosis can be identified as a type of resistance to social norms. Correlatively, art was seen as counter-acting repression, freeing consciousness [...]
Suits black ink faded to green and stretched over weathered fingers the tribal heart an illusion due to my grandmother’s name layers of memory etched into his skin five cents a name and twenty dollars to hide his impulsive nature I never knew the other woman the symbols of his past shine through grease and [...]
LANDSCAPE ____________________________________________ Tom Sleigh has won numerous awards, including the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters,The Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Guggenheim Foundation grant. He currently serves as director of Hunter College’s MFA program in Creative Writing. He is the [...]
Primalism: the testing for all aesthetic value wagered on the energies of the primal, the root, the raw, the atavistic, the unconscious, with a corresponding mistrust of the social conventions, the art of the decorative and contrived, and, above all, a dismissal of the thinking faculty save in its aspect as “process of ongoing revery.” [...]
Related Linkage _____________________________________________________________ Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), winner the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A former Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she’s currently a doctoral [...]
Visual Poetry Rachael Briggs is a research fellow in the philosophy department at the Australian National University, and writes poetry to unwind. She is the winner of the 2011 Val Vallis Award for Unpublished Poetry, and the cafe poet at the Cafe Checcocho (through the Australian Poetry Centre’s Cafe Poet program).
Myth of Cosmos It stands outside of myself, something round, flecked with spit, like a moon« growing out of my nails, moon« of phenomenal lactescence. I push my head into the roundess & a cloud« is my face & I see particles of mist« floating away. There’s nothing I can do or limb or crook [...]
1. So what are some other major facets of Ashbery’s relationship to American pragmatism? How would we characterize pragmatism, and in what ways does Ashbery’s work suggest our characterization? Does Ashbery ever explicitly mention James, Dewey, or Rorty? (I know of only one place currently where Rorty mentions Ashbery; it is in his introduction to [...]
The Magic Cat by Andre, Year 6 Stanmore Public School The feline stands as proud as a lion. It is as blue as the eyes of a dark panther. Its journey comes across the valley of the kings. Its whiskers white as a dwarf star. Even if its head is like the desert, Its body [...]
This entry is part of a series, Ashbery and Pragmatist Poetics» Introduction: Why the Lyric Essay? 1. I want to start with a problem: an overwhelming, close to paralyzing sense that an essay about John Ashbery’s poetry is like a representational critique of a cubist painting. The two (essay and poetry) just feel ill-fitting, strange [...]
The Poetry Object encourages young writers and their teachers submit poems and photographs about objects that are special to them. Springing from The Red Room Company’s education program, The Poetry Object is a free writing project for students attending NSW Public Schools in the Sydney Region. Special objects that inspired poems in 2011 included coffee [...]
Francis Thompson 1859-1907 by Robert Adamson He slept by the Thames in newspapers, a makeshift blanket, fevered talk. A loaded opium pipe. How much did it cost for his pencil to curve across pages? At dawn a red fox limped past and unsettled the sparrows. Francis drew down words, one at a time— worried about [...]
Exile: an invitation to a struggle (from My Rice tastes like the lake. Berkeley, CA: Apogee Press, 2011) Mother tells me to eat well. Mother who knows best, asks, how are you? She has asked this all of my life. There are only two answers to this question. Two answers keep us mother and son, [...]
