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 [...]

Vladimir Sorokin stands atop a list of Russian novelists, along with Tatyana Tolstaya, Victor Pelevin, and Victor Erofeyev, who have married an old-school sci-fi sensibility with American cyberpunk hipness to constitute the vanguard of literary social criticism in Moscow. Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy not only established him as a progenitor of the form but garnered for him a reputation as Russia’s bad boy literary star, whose brazen challenges to authority and occasional pornographic content compelled the Putin Youth to dump his works into a giant makeshift toilet. His latest work, Day of the Oprichnik (translated by Jamey Gambrell) imagines a Moscow of 2028. The Red Troubles (presumably the Soviet era) are over, as are the White Troubles (whatever those might have been) that followed them, and the czarship has been restored. It is The Russian Revival, or, as characters refer to it, “Nowadays.” The oprichniki are the defenders of the oprichnina, [...]

Many young poets can not accept that telling a story, or relating some sort of narrative arc is conducive to the highest aims of poetry. Of course this is a confusion between story telling and narrative. They are not the same. Narrative is the pulse and rhythm of being. Whitman is an intensely narrative poet, as is Emily Dickinson. Stories stay in touch with this pulse of being in the most obvious ways. The great triumph of Chekhov is that he muted the obviousness of story, blurred the distinctions between plot and character, and took prose into territories of consciousness previously known only to the most subjective and simple of lyrical poems. Story may be destroyed, but never narrative. If I write Oy vey! The sun is batting its eye lashes and I am a tired tree I am, for all my pretensions to surrealism, still in the arms of [...]

Love-Busker I’ve got an ugly, but I’ll never tell, how pretty your please. I’ve got a screw tight, and wheels for wheels, and an *. I’ve got a real good thing, going, so pardon my by- your-leave. A way of opening ah and putting me under. Over and out. I’ve got muscles in there, somewhere. A tooth that won’t grow in. Spit whistle, thumper finger, tin can clang I’m your one man band. A memory of lapses. A good cold. A winterized grin. My boutique hard-sell soft-core will pink you in. It’s rolled-gold bold. If you want love in a king-size bed beware my disease: symptoms: catchall goodwill and a right knee jitter. __________________________________________ Peter Kline‘s poetry has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, Poetry, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2010 Morton Marr Prize from the Southwest Review, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford [...]

This entry is part of a series, Lowell's Bedlam» , Lowell's Bedlam» NOTE: This is part one of a two-part dialogue on Alfred Corn‘s play Lowell’s Bedlam. The first part, by poet and theater historian M G Stevens, appeared previously. *** Staring out at the audience of the Pentameters Theatre, David Manson as the poet Robert Lowell distrustfully remarks ‘This is a two-way mirror, isn’t it?’ While in Alfred Corn’s play the Bostonian is informed he is looking at a window, part of the work’s triumph is that we obtain a sense throughout that the events we are seeing have been transfigured by a spectator who is both Lowell the artist and Lowell the man, tormented by his past. Observation, here, is everything. The ostensible setting of Lowell’s Bedlam is Pitney Akins Hospital, New York in 1949 where the writer is being treated for bipolar disorder. The director Daniel Ricken, [...]

NOTE: This is part one of a two-part dialogue on Alfred Corn‘s play Lowell’s Bedlam, which had it’s world premiere on April 7, 2011 in London. The second part, by poet John McCullough, appeared afterward. *** The poet Alfred Corn has written a marvelous, sharply observed, and brilliantly imagined play about Robert Lowell’s stay in a mental hospital for his bipolar disorder. Corn includes the poet Elizabeth Bishop and the prose writer Elizabeth Hardwick in his dramatic tale, which is told from the point-of-view of one of the hospital’s denizens, a fellow who befriends Lowell over a card game. Pentameters is one of the oldest fringe theatres in London, famous for its relationships with poets, including Robert Lowell, so it was an equally apt venue to present the world premiere production of this work. Leonie Scott-Matthews, the artistic director at Pentameters for the past forty years, introduced the evening by [...]

Suleiman A simple poem would be content travelling Back from the future to transfer its burden Of knowledge about the present, but this one Stays in that present, unable to see Anything beyond the overrun square. Or mistakes seeing for having just talked, Waits there with permanent demands…. That one too is ultimately simple, As simple as having something to say About death (it’s partially total), As simple as Egypt if Egypt were To live forever on the edges of the square (Twenty years from now the square is gone). The complex poem admits all this From a counter-present the future denies All knowledge of, where talking looks Like seeing and seeing writes it down Whether or not in the order it should It comes. The peaceful transfer of Power from the past to the future Sees the end of a present, escorted By sand. It’s also the complex poem [...]

from THE  NOTEBOOK

In His Tree They are untold: the advantages of entangling oneself completely in a place like this, up and beyond all chance of discovery, here where untold means not in the dark, but numberless, numberless not without number, but many—and if I sit in the dark now and wait without number, the difference is I do it voluntarily. Not the way the yellow leaf is chased by another but the way the word yellow can be drawn by hand through the same pond air and then across an open page. Here the one keeps evolving into the next, like listening into seeing thin layer after layer of nacre affix to (to whelm) the body fastened to sleep in the heart of a pearl. All afternoon a feeling needed to be described to me before I knew what I felt. The very terms of this predicament had disqualified me from the [...]

The two loves of Kalamaras’s life: Surrealism and Hindu mysticism (with a touch of rhetorical theory!). A serious look at his work would address how his poetry investigates the intriguing parallels between surrealism and Eastern mysticism, a relationship already hinted at in the origins of Pound’s ideogrammic method, which became the basis of the modernist image. Kalamaras blurs the line between the poetic and mystic: “Central to my work as a poet is the exploration of language as a way to conjure ‘silence,’ or moments of discursive interruption and dissolve, in which all seeming oppositions are complementary rather than contradictory.” offers two dozen poems, all in the same form: couplet stanzas where each line is a (usually) complete sentence. Part of a larger project called The Bone Sutras, these poems resemble . The poems are stoic, even, one might feel, mechanical. The method is pretty clear: self-contained sentences/lines that center [...]

No Real Than You Are Not to know me is not to not love me. I could be anywhere near you. Lemon meringue? It’s no good unless it falls apart. It not you. Someone put a logo right over my face. Call for the opener of the mouth, Philip Morris. The words want to be alone together. It’s one way to put them through it. Ethics not aesthetics demands it. People yell, attracted by a gesture — personal, spontaneous, sincere. But jammed verbally. It’s all automatic, spooking the flowers. Are you asleep? The sleeper has two left sides. It wants no straps. Its dreams are light glowing up from under flowing water. We’ll finish the story later with the words at hand. Keep a top eye out for visions. NOTE: The art is a sketch by painter George Schneeman, who recently passed away. _____________________________________ Larry Fagin‘s books include Parade of [...]