Once I Walked Out Once I walked out and the world rushed to my side. The willows bent their willowy necks, tossed green hair hugely. The hawk cried by the well. The crows kept counting their kind. Once I walked out and the sheep bleated with sensitivity, touched black muzzles to the grass. I was followed by dogs, by flies, by horses both curious and spiteful. The field of beans worked its sums under green, the corn licked the air to haze. I said goodbye to the house with its sagging porch, attic hung with bats. Goodbye braided rug, rabbit hutch, corn popper, copper tub . The green world greened around me— Virginia creeper, crown vetch, thistle, mullein, sumac. I was full in my limbs, my laugh, pinkish skin. I swung my arms, pulled air into lungs— pine pollen, dust mote, mold spore, atomized dew, bright wheel of flame twisting [...]

At a party last Thursday night after a full day at this year’s AWP conference, I broke one of my own absolute rules – never, under any circumstances resort to quoting The Big Lebowski. Out of some mixture of awkwardness and that day’s hang over, I recited a line from my high school idol the Dude to another poet. I was simply passing a good piece of advice along, a bit of practical philosophy – some times you eat the bar, and, well, sometimes he eats you. It seemed appropriate, as she’d just finished a tirade, and we’d both lost interest in the subject. By the time I got to bar, she was speaking the line loudly, with panache. She was in on the joke, eager for me to know it, which is what I continually find so gross. At some point in the last 5 years (maybe longer?) seemingly [...]

…“This is the world,” I think, “this is what I came in search of years ago.” Now I can go back to my single room, I can lie awake in the dark rehearsing all the trivial events of the day ahead, a day that begins when the sun clears the dark spires of someone’s god, and I waken in a flood of dust rising from nowhere and from nowhere comes the actual voice of someone else. -from “The Music of Time” As we have been trained over decades to expect from Philip Levine, his latest book of poems, News of the World, is an unsurprisingly likeable collection of environmental portraits rendered with acute sensitivity to history and class. Those who know Levine’s work will find much familiar about many of these poems—and happily so, as his strengths as a poet have resisted dulling over time and profuse exercise. The spoken [...]

some of Deborah’s poems here and find links to some of the things Ben and Deborah talk about in the interview.

It was the novel, specifically The Brothers Karamazov, that once and for all set me on the path toward dedicating my life to literature. Only recently has poetry come to occupy a similarly sacred space as the novel in my outlook. This delay is not due to any prejudice on my part, but more to a simple lack of sufficient exposure. The main catalyst for this awakening was John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” When I first encountered it, I had been studying Pynchon, Barth, DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace. Namely, practitioners of the massive, whose major works will undoubtedly stand as monuments to our historical and cultural moment. “Self-Portrait” is one such undertaking. The sheer philosophical, epistemological, formal and emotional scope exhilarates me every time I read it. It is a virtuosic, dynamic, and ultimately heart-wrenching meditation on self-consciousness and loss, central notions of late twentieth-century art. Like [...]

Photo Everyone in it dead now––Dad, three, in a skirt––and I see her again, the unnamed woman. She is me. No one to introduce us: Hello, Me. Unruly eyebrow woman, eyes sepia but blue––they must be; hair pulled slant, frame bent lensward, skeptical mouth smiling––I know you. How did you leash your mind, when you looked through the small window or stared through water at your veined hand? _______________________________________ Joan Larkin’s most recent collection, My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press) received the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. She teaches in Drew University’s Low-Residency MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.

James Schuyler is back from the dead with the lovely “Other Flowers” a posthumous book of his unpublished, uncollected poems. Everything I have come to know and love about Schuyler’s eye and heart is here in generous supply. The poems are – like so many of the poems published in his lifetime – made from a kind of brilliance disguised as innocence; a sadness disguised as joy. They feel closer to jazz and painting than to another kind of poetry. And, like they are peculiarly of their own time: still timeless as any poetry this indelible (though more in the sense of memorable than something held down or restricted by an era), but they are also poems that feel (somewhat like Frank O’Hara, Joe Brainard and, later, Frank Bidart) almost immediately nostalgic. The subject matter here is still the same as it’s always been: New York, adventures in intimacy, pop [...]

Marianne Moore probably would have hated my guts, considering my rather sloppy, and sprawling ways, and she would have been right to do so. She scares me the way Cordelia scares me–by dint of her absolute integrity. She makes me love her the way I once loved an impossibly precise and severe girl in the fourth grade, who in addition to precision and severity, took an absolute delight in whatever she found worthy, surpassing any delight I had previously witnessed. It was calm, yet intense, and of a constancy once formed that made me wish I was a better person. I realized her delight was far greater, and of far more depth than my unbridled enthusiasms. Until then, I had thought myself substantial. Without ever insulting me, or explicitly disapproving of my shallowness, this girl dismantled my high self-notions. I loved and feared her, and wanted more than anything to [...]

If you are a poet writing in English, you carry Horace in your own voice. I’m convinced there really is no way around this. I’m not sure there’s any possible strain of English poetry that can avoid his influence. And who would want to? Horace is a master of lyric poetry. To learn better how we speak as poets, we should all be looking at and coming to grips with Horace. This looking back (not so much ad fontes as Jacob wrestling God) is made difficult by the fact that most of us don’t know Latin (or the Greek of the poets Horace learned from). And even for those who do, the collapse that exists between Latin and English can seem insurmountable. I was a terrible student when I studied Latin and Greek and have since forgotten much of it. Looking back now, I can see that I looked at [...]

to see some of the poems Ben Mirov reads and find some other links to items from the interview. Ben Mirov, Part 1 Ben Mirov, Part 2

Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Weldon Kees’s poem “1926.”

What inspires us to write poetry? I would think that the commonly accepted assumption about poets is that if one is a poet, he or she has always been a poet. The obvious question which should follow this then is “Can someone be a poet without having any knowledge of poetry?” “Are we born poets?” Let’s begin with this: Most primary, intermediate, and secondary schools include some study of poetry in their curriculums, and yet for the majority of these schools, this is not the primary focus, nor is it rendered a very crucial one. I suppose my first encounter with poetry was a poem written in a photo album of my formative years by my father and mother: “I drop, you catch,/ I cry, you fetch,/I kvetch, you kvetch” (cleverly scrawled next to a picture of me, naked, crawling along the carpet). Of course, this isn’t Pulitzer worthy by [...]

Packing Her Things And I could nearly stand it—the stained blouses; the nubs of drying lipsticks with their botched nose jobs; the undershirts; the bras; the slips; the books. I packed them away, like a dutiful child. I did it dry-eyed, thinking, I could spend a day like this in hell, and then at the back of the closet I found her cache of gift bags—pretty foil bags; tiny starred ones; slick big bags with cabbage roses— the way we both squirrel them away. I never knew, the way I cried when I saw her paintings for the first time, or her secret collection of beaded purses. Which part of the soul is handed down? Which part is its own? Then I sank down on the bed and howled. I wept like an orphaned child. ___________________________________________ Liz Rosenberg is the author of the novel Home Repair and five books of [...]

It was after an initial reading that left me intrigued yet oddly ill-at-ease, that a tidbit in Caroline Knox’s laconic introduction to her new collection of poems from Wave Books, The Nine Worthies, helped me, if not entirely to penetrate a body of work that at times seems to take as its subject matter the very notion of the impenetrability of language, then at least to begin to understand the cause of my own disquietude. The clue (an apt noun considering that Nine Worthies is perhaps formally closer to a mystery novella than to a standard collection of modern lyric verse) that Knox provides is this: that the eighteenth century New England “real life” characters that inhabit these interlocking prose poems are in the midst of experiencing the “end of [their] Englishness.” The year, we are told in an epigraph to the book, is 1756; the locations Boston and Newport. [...]