Extract from My Ragged Company, #19 I asked Alice to ask me to marry her. She asked if I wanted to lick the painting on the hotel wall. That’s a poster, I said. Just a paper Hopper: a sad woman in a red teddy sat on a hotel bed reading a yellow letter: He’s not coming back. I asked for a kiss. She asked for a testament. Outside, I asked a man to point me to a lake or a liquor store. In Michigan, the man said, a liquids most obvious attribute is repression. But, he said, all taverns in Michigan share one trait: inside is someone that will make you feel at home. I followed his pointer. I walked across the street. I took the ferry. I climbed a hill and a tree and sat in a deer blind for a week until two hunters found me and took [...]

City Lights Books just published Compression & Purity, a new poetry book by L.A.-based African-American surrealist, Will Alexander. Alexander writes densely textured “psychedelic” or scientific surrealism with a strong affinity for arcane vocabulary. “On Scorpions & Swallows” begins: Not claimed by the accessible as contrast or as competition by loss or mathematics by peril but occlusion as opposable phylums minus a dark synesthesial as rote minus the axial smoke of a rotted bonfire hamlet I mean oasis as savage dialectic rotation meaning species as aggressive salt as curious vertical blazing in reversed arrayal I think of interior cobalt swallows with predacious ignition a contradictory igniting beautific with scopolamine I am struck with Alexander’s careful phrasings, his manipulation of thematic shape and his mastery of extensions. For instance, the poetry quoted above, “On Scorpions & Swallows,” reads like a single, extended sentence creating a sonnet-like problem-and-answer structure to the poem. Alexander [...]

One can see that David Foster Wallace was thinking about the main problem of what would become his final work when he delivered his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005. Now regarded as a seminal piece on modern compassion, it proposed to reveal, as any small-college commencement address worth its speaker fee is wont to do, the “real purpose” of a liberal arts education. For Wallace, it was this: Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this [...]

Cursivism, Will Hubbard’s slim, debut volume of prose poems published by Ugly Duckling Presse, begins with a simple piece of advice that may be one of the most challenging charges facing anyone who is trying to figure out how to live, “just let it happen.” Though the mother’s instruction refers to how to tend an orchid the speaker has wooed into blossom mid-winter, it also applies to everything and anything our lives might encompass. To live by that advice requires difficult virtues: restraint, patience, and faith. Hubbard’s poems exhibit all three. The poems that comprise Cursivism humbly speak at the same time as personal anecdotes, somber and revelatory reflections on the past, whimsical tales, and truths. These poems are modestly anthemic for members of Generation Y— those of us waking up to the fact that we’ve inherited a fraught world of questions that don’t have answers, and where many days [...]

The best art school I ever attended was my childhood friend, Marco Munoz’ studio above a Florist shop on Elizabeth Avenue, Elizabeth, New Jersey, circa 1977 to 1980. We were kids, the sons of factory workers, and immigrants/exiles from Cuba and Peru and, by all the usual expectations and social indicators, we were not supposed to exist. I was the token white American Irish Catholic guy. Marco had known me from grade school at St. Mary’s, but had left to attend what was then Jefferson High school. I didn’t see him from 8th grade until the end of my senior year. By then, he had taken classes with a charismatic high school art teacher called “Tags” (an Italian name shortened with affection). Tags hipped his students into Jazz as well as Jasper Johns, Pollack, Mondrian, Braque, etc. So Marco had this crew of artsy kids who smoked pipes, talked poetry, [...]

Bloodwork Some guy, bleeding, just beaten by hooded strangers on the late train, asks some girl, Miss S, a witness, the same question that lovers ask each other turning from mirrors, away, “How do I look?” & she, bystanding, replies “Frankly, you’re in a bad way.” She’d been thinking of the one, long gone, who got away, the one who’d taken himself from her & those days when she’d turn, adoring, to him. Amazing. (That’s what he used to say.) Thus S, on loss, ruminates. You can see what she’s getting at, can see where she’s heading. Your eyes have got that same telling ache & sanguine reverie. You too have once walked in twos, linked to another in the light rain…. But we all, now & then, walk alone, especially in the city of men, where most you meet are bled dry & broken, or have cashed in care [...]

Reach into the cloud
architecture, almost to the stars.
I lived where they are made
growing up as a kid.
I just wonder what people
are thinking sometimes,
or what happens to ideas
too un evil to endure.
Out there near the edge
the ferocactus has begun to bloom.
I heard once some skaters
were murdered there.
Today I would only
take advice from an angel.
She says soon you will grow
into a beautiful girl.
Soon you will become a planet,
moons and everything.
Sometimes I feel so happy
I forget I’m going to die,
then I go to the desert
with just my sticks
and wait for the shaman.
He always comes.
And raises a temple up
from the dirt, to give to my life
a gleam of delirium, that I may
accept the final results with grace.

A selection from Upriver It was a struggle switching over to a citrus flavored toothpaste, but Roosevelt loved her. The more nights he spent at Linda’s place, the less sense it made to keep brushing with just water. She never offered outright, but he used her toothbrush that already tasted mostly like oranges anyway. “We are not a regular couple,” she would say. “We have a structure.” This was true. They followed a very precise schedule. But Roosevelt’s nose was sensitive. He thought about toothpaste when they kissed at night and he should’ve been thinking about her. _____________________________________________________________ Sara Slaughter lives in New Orleans and is currently enrolled in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Honeyland Review, Method, and a collection celebrating what would have been the 100th birthday of Elizabeth Bishop. Related Posts Poem(s) of the Week: M.A. Vizsolyi [...]

Carl Jung’s work on introverted and extroverted personality types based on four functions of thinking/feeling (the rational) and intuition/sensation (the irrational) has been modified by various experts in relational dynamics, most especially Meyers Briggs and its various off shoots. Some sort of personality test is now administered by businesses interested in relational dynamics and team productivity” Active listeners, North thinkers, Explorers, negotiators…all these terms used by education and corporate movements are meant to gauge the mechanisms of personality by which we see, move through, and relate to the world. It is nothing new. Shakespeare and other dramatists used the four humors in their construction of characters. Astrology links the personality types to stars, dates, location and time of birth. All these systems of gauging personality types are inexact, what we might call, if we used a machinist’s term, an “eye ball estimate.” But, as such, they can be useful for [...]

Dead reckoning Late in the day and the sky is still white. When I look across the river I see another city. Even the sun is still so white. Yesterday I went walking with my hands in front of me and my lungs inside me I know I did. See, nothing has changed between us and the selves that arrived here. Sometimes the moon still appears, after a struggle. Other times it is obscured, is absent. The moon, beyond which are stars. People following them from another latitude. Yesterday I went walking and in front of me were hands. _______________________________________ Adam Tessier lives in Cambridge, where he manages a coffee shop. He has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Memorious, Linebreak, Remedy Quarterly, Anti-, and elsewhere. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Joseph Fasano The Melody Ascends Stepwise February 15, 2010 [...]

After wrestling through several Latin translations of Horace and trying to come to grips with him as a poet, I decided the best way to get “into Horace’s head” would be to translate him myself. Though Mrs. Krepich, my high school Latin teacher, might have hoped otherwise, my Latin, poor to begin with, has atrophied. I am saved somewhat by my slightly better Greek, but I barely limp through the original for the most part. So I roped a local Latin professor into my venture and we’ve been meeting once a week, translating and debating the meaning of Horace. Later, with our discussion in mind, I will make a translation in hopes of “righting” whatever wrongs I feel has been done by modern translators. I’m not really righting any wrongs, of course–just putting my own spin on things. But it’s been an interesting learning process. We were foolish enough to [...]

Just before puberty struck with the force of the furies and made me a moody kid, prone to sudden bouts of gloom and equally sudden bouts of elation, it was discovered that I had a gift for music. The mode of discovery was a cheap 20 dollar Magnus chord organ purchased for my sister at the now defunct “Two Guys” supermarket. Two Guys wasn’t exactly a supermarket, but, rather a combination of a supermarket, clothing, and toy store–with a little bowling and pin ball area for the kids to keep them busy, and way ahead of its time (Sort of a proto-Trader Joe’s/Wegman’s). It went out of business sometime in the late 70s, I believe, but, at the time, it was known as a place with good cuts of meat and an area to keep the kids occupied while the parents shopped. Anyway, my parents purchased the organ for my [...]

1. “John Billy,” which begins, “Was me supposed to tell Simple Ranger how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him and fleen to parts unguessed,” and is the fifth of 10 stories that appear in Girl with Curious Hair, strikes me as starkly different from most of Wallace’s work. This is, for example, one of the very few of his short stories that feature or is focused on lower class characters. There is also the tailor in the story “Say Never,” in Girl with Curious Hair, and the last piece in Oblivion involves some poor Midwesterners, though it’s not about them, and there are some stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men where, it seems to me, it’s ambiguous. But, for the most part, Wallace’s world is made up of well-educated, gainfully employed, could-go-to-therapy-if-they-wanted, upper middle class whites. There is no one in his short stories who [...]

Sudden Hymn in Autumn I remember a woman handing me fruit through my illness. I remember her hands were thin: two gazelles lost in a field of clove. Every time I came back, I heard insects splitting their cores for slender wings. I remember a woman they hanged from the barn’s rafters, her nightgown blowing toward the pond. Some boys had wrestled a buck to the ground, covered him in gasoline. In the morning someone came with a knot of black antlers: what he’d found ten feet high in a poplar tree. I remember October hunched like a colt in a suit of black leaves. I remember hearing him breach the room, how his heavy tack dragged on the floor, how I lifted an arm in trust of his body. _______________________________________ Joseph Fasano was born and raised in New York’s Hudson River Valley. His poems have appeared in Tin House, [...]

What does a writer need? I think, first and last, a writer needs to write. I think this is an obvious idea that, because it is obvious, often goes overlooked. Compared to this need, good teachers, free time, the approval of one’s peers, beautiful mistresses, and noble prizes, are utterly beside the point. Many writers have disappeared under the weight of those other needs. Writers who are busy writing do not commit suicide because it’s very difficult to write when you’re dead, and they are writing. Flannery O’Connor spoke of maintaining a ” habit” of art. The words art and habit might seem an odd pairing, but that’s what art is: the glamor of drudgery, and the drudgery of glamor. Picasso continued to scribble. If Sylvia Plath had been on a writing streak, she would not have committed suicide when she did. Maybe later because, for all her talent, she [...]