Some smart folks insist Nat King Cole doesn’t get enough credit for his vital and historical role in Jazz trio piano playing. Hell, I’ve often said it. In point of fact, it’s been said so often that it isn’t true. We should qualify as such: Nat King Cole gets plenty of credit as the revolutionary [...]
This entry is part of a series, Unlocked» Jumanji a group poem Trunk packed and ready for nowhere, Manuscript tells stories in spots and dashes called songs. Song list on the lampbase doubling as a microphone, The man looks lonely and lost As though he’s taken one last look before leaving It reminds me of [...]
from KING OF THE FOREST from City of Moths My friend thinks that poetry has nothing to do with words. Poetry she says, is a mountain. An actual mountain. A thing that fools climb simply “because it’s there.” Poetry is there, but why do we constantly feel the need to prove it exists? To point [...]
This entry is part of a series, Unlocked» Unlocked is an educational program developed and run by The Red Room Company in collaboration with NSW Correctional Centres. The program aims to unlock the potential of inmates through the transformative possibilities of poetry. Australian poets are taken into the centres to run intensive writing workshops, working [...]
Automatonophilia Love of things that falsely represent a sentient being You married a marionette for the lumbering way that she succumbs to teeth. You saw; she sways and says okay. And she admires the daze you move in, hydroplaning days away: exultant accidents. Instead of me, a blissful wooden girl; a wooden knee submitted for [...]
I came by Oppen in 1979 via the wonderful–to my way of thinking–historically significant anthology, A Geography of Poets. I remember liking his poem, “Street” and memorizing it, then going no further. I was never one to devour poets (except Roethke, Williams, Stevens, and, weirdly, May Swenson). I preferred anthologies where, if the editor was [...]
This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» Fountain 77, Glebe For Timothy Yu Plastic-sheathed roses embroider the dark. _________________Set to volplane we take photo-triptychs, each of the other. Moments of daring oscillate in the strangers we become. _________________And arms betray us, they link our assembly of states, ventriloquised, ________cravassed by cloud, echoes, reason’s [...]
Elegy for a Forty-Three Pound Woman with Mental Retardation Autumn and you are in your mother’s house. __________Plants no longer turn _____but fail down to the soil _______________from which they sprung. To be sure I can’t speak properly to you until Winter _____when the kindly rescuer appeared to find you alive and moving, resuscitating a [...]
Mayakovsky’s Revolver By Matthew Dickman WW Norton Forthcoming October 2012 ISBN 978-0-393-08119-0 112 pages Matthew Dickman received the second fan letter I’ve ever written. The first was written in 1989, when I was ten years old, and it was addressed to Howard Johnson, an infielder for the New York Mets. Johnson—or “HoJo,” to baseball cognoscenti—wore [...]
This entry is part of a series, In a Dark Room» It was late in the smoke-painted bar, a quarter past the blue hour, when The Interviewer pulled The Poet into an even darker room. And in the dark of that darkness, came the first question. Tell me, said the Interviewer, where do your poems [...]
This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» The Disappearing Suite They hover on the edges, their voices haunting the blue hour when the tide of memory recedes and forgetfulness returns, washing over the ash-prints of their passing, so faint, yet so fresh you can’t tell if the moment is disappearing or about to [...]
INVISIBLE FUNERAL IN ONE ACT A bird runs into a window Enter: A woman (who looks like me) staring at the patterns on a Persian rug __Enter: A stagehand, carrying a mirror The woman tapes black construction paper over the mirror When she stares at the rug and then back at the blacked- out mirror, [...]
LMB:You talk about the body as a representation of the world around us – it is. Everything we are is everything there is. But the body may not be the only way we exist. If our hair is the war, , and the war is our body, does writing keep us from falling apart? Does [...]
Poor Robert Creeley. In the 60s and 70s he was right up there with Robert Bly (though their styles are utterly different, their names are similar). The Robert he should have been paired with is Robert Francis, a great minor poet (minor in the best sense), who lived in the cool ominous, hawk’s wing shadow [...]
This entry is part of a series, In a Dark Room» It was late in the smoke-painted bar, a quarter past the blue hour, when The Interviewer pulled The Poet into an even darker room. And in the dark of that darkness, came the first question. Tell me, said the Interviewer, where do your poems [...]
______________________________________________________________ Bradley Harrison grew up in small town Iowa and is a graduate of Truman State University. Currently a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin, his work can be found in Gulf Coast, CutBank, The Los Angeles Review, Hunger Mountain, New Orleans Review and other journals. His chapbook Diorama of a People, [...]
