When they say, “Spring is in the air,” they aren’t kidding. New York City is fully abloom–and it is most certainly in the air. Yes, the tulips and daffodils are afoot in the city! Perfectly coiffed Park Avenue flower arrangements trumpet out enormous lilies at pedestrians. Petunias and pansies galore! Primped poodles in their fluffed white glory don’t give damn about signs directing them away from the flower plots, it’s all the same to them—they’re just happy to be out of winter coats. Bees of all kinds are quite busy. Poets are everywhere with little black notebooks, scribbling furiously at the crocuses sprouting up around trees in the parks. But most New Yorkers (poets included, we just persevere and suffer later) are walking around in a Claritin daze, and it’s worse than ever. Itchy eyes, sneezing, throats ablaze. Doctors are saying this year’s pollen boom is the most prolific one [...]

Novel I. No one’s serious at seventeen. –On beautiful nights when beer and lemonade And loud, blinding cafés are the last thing you need –You stroll beneath green lindens on the promenade. Lindens smell fine on fine June nights! Sometimes the air is so sweet that you close your eyes; The wind brings sounds–the town is near– And carries scents of vineyards and beer… II. –Over there, framed by a branch You can see a little patch of dark blue Strung by a sinister star that fades With faint quiverings, so mall and white… June nights! Seventeen!–Drink it in. Sap is champagne, it goes to your head… The mind wanders, you feel a kiss On your lips, quivering like a living thing… III. The wild heart Crusoes through a thousand novels –And when a young girl walks alluringly Through a streetlamp’s pale light, beneath the ominous shadow Of her father’s [...]

FALSTAFF God save thee, my sweet boy! KING HENRY IV My lord chief-justice, speak to that vain man. LORD CHIEF-JUSTICE Have you your wits? know you what ’tis to speak? FALSTAFF My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart! KING HENRY IV I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! I have long dream’d of such a kind of man, So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so profane; But, being awaked, I do despise my dream. Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace; Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape For thee thrice wider than for other men. Reply not to me with a fool-born jest: Presume not that I am the thing I was; For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, That I have turn’d away my former self; So will I those [...]

Eros, by H.D. I. Where is he taking us now that he has turned back? Where will this take us, this fever, spreading into light? Nothing we have ever felt, nothing we have dreamt, or conjured in the night or fashioned in loneliness, can equal this. Where is he taking us, Eros, now that he has turned back? II. Keep love and he wings with his bow, up, mocking us, keep love and he taunts us and escapes. Keep love and he sways apart in another world, outdistancing us. Keep love and he mocks, ah, bitter and sweet, your sweetness is more cruel that your hurt. Honey and salt, fire burst from the rocks to meet fire spilt from Hesperus. Fire darted aloft and met fire, and in that moment love entered us. IV. Could Eros be kept, he was prisoned love since and sick with imprisonment, could Eros be [...]

See more about Dottie Lasky’s POETRY IS NOT A PROJECT Get it at while the ink is still wet. Available at the UDP portion of the “table X publishing commune.” Related Posts Book Review: Map of the Folded World (John Gallaher)

How do you know when you’re “done” a poem? I’m not speaking about revision, but rather, the act of writing, particularly lyrical free verse. Donna Masini once described it to me (or a class I was in—can’t remember which), as a settling in the body: a literal sense in the poet’s body that there is no more to write. What a strange way to describe it—yet, I find it has been true with me. I’ll be sitting in front of a computer, write a line, and suddenly, intuitively, I know the poem is finished. It’s a sense of relief, that sighing experience when you’ve just removed a splinter (though the process of removing a poem from your body is usually more pleasurable. Grossman speaks about the silence from which a poem comes. Silence is the place where “all men agree.” Not only this, but one must overcome silence, the gap [...]

Ben Lerner is damn smart. In case you aren’t convinced by my saying so, you need only stop and examine one his books the next time you have a chance. Just the titles of , , and most recently, suggest that the enclosed works have elaborate scholarly underpinnings. Lerner’s cerebral poetry isn’t chip-on-the-shoulder intellectualism or self-conscious hipsterism, however, and to shy away from his books because of their rigorous erudition would be to miss a difficult, witty, utterly sincere contemporary writer. Lerner’s latest project is a sensitive exploration of how our inherited war- and commerce-freighted language might be capable of intimate expression. According to the publisher’s blurb on the back cover of the book, which is the most succinct explanation I could find of the title: “In physics, the “mean free path” of a particle is the average distance it travels before colliding with another particle.” In adopting this phrase [...]

is this a poem? i don’t know. i don’t care. A) she’s a poet and greying ghost put out a poetry chapbook of hers B) it’s awesome and in terms of its approach to the idea of the lyric i’d say it’s probably better than a deal of things i’ve read in verse. when i say better i want to qualify that: it is inventive and invigorating. inventive may not be the right word. but say this aloud. a lot. mark leidner is a poet. this much we know. here is his contribution to this month’s edition of everyday genius new issue of octopus up! much longer than the old issue of octopus! new issue of born up: oh hey can you watch awesome poem-movies in that recent review you picked up? no? too bad. good thing you can do that for free on the internet. several poems from the [...]

She hears, upon that water wide without sound, A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” —Wallace Stevens, ‘Sunday Morning’ “Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.” —T.S. Eliot —Derrida on Christianity & Deconstruction Hegel said we live in a speculative Good Friday—that the moment of philosophy is to think of God’s death, his absence, forseeing at least a hundred years the 20th century. Was there ever a century more sure and fraught with such an absence, devoid of absolute goods, of whatever Christianity meant, beyond its corruptions, scandals and inglorious crusades? 502 (Johnson) At least — to pray — is left [...]

It’s been a year since that goddamned horse died and I have yet to pick up the pieces. It brought me water on down that road. It took the tarp with buck’d teeth and made a tent by lifting it over the low branches of a nearby tree. It’s been a year since that goddamned horse died and I’ve used all the lessons he taught me during our time together braving the elements. My right arm has burned off from the sun’s radiation and I can no longer call out at night in pain like I used to. It’s been a year since that goddamned horse died from swallowing the last of the Brita filters. And even if having clean water did nothing it made me feel safe, like we were able to improve our own condition. It’s been a year since that goddamned horse died. Triple crown I lost [...]

A CORSAGE Feeling like “a very village of sorrow,” Just like Franz Schubert, with each sad bourgeois Dolorously doleful, I only said When you asked me for my life-story, “Well, the world is a funny place, un Pleasant things can happen.” I chewed The silence, cryptic and stupidly. I felt diminished by myself, much like The passport photographs that make you look Like an escaped convict or The victim of circumstances. I Am the oyster shell, after the Succulent seaworm’s been devoured, With only the pretense of sea in your cupped Ear. The next day you wore a Corsage of pansies. Exultantly alive, serious scholars Of melancholy, brave and lionhearted With thoughtful thoughts. Now In this well of eyes before me, icy eyes, Now in the Broadway 7th Avenue Van Cortlandt Subway, feeling quite walled in, Henry David Thoreau breaks the ice, says “Time is the stream I go a [...]

SEGUE SERIES PRESENTS: BENJAMIN FRIEDLANDER AND FANNY HOWE, 4pm, April Segue Series Presents: Benjamin Friedlander and Fanny Howe Benjamin Friedlander’s many books include Time Rations, A Knot Is Not a Tangle, and Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (University of Alabama Press, 2004). He lives and works in Maine. Fanny Howe is a poet, novelist, and short story writer with over 30 titles published. She was the recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. http://www.bowerypoetrylive.com/

Easier Than Learning Klingon Jason Crane reviews John Gallaher’s Map of the Folded World In the realm of wrong answers, someone always has the radio on. – “I Will Sing the Monster to Sleep, & He Will Need Me” ~ I’ve been watching the middle seasons of Stargate SG-1 again. If you’ve never seen the show, the premise is that there are Stargates that allow instant travel between planets. You step into one and step out into a completely different landscape. To get around the problem of having to invent new languages for every race of aliens encountered, the producers cut the knot this way: They explained that a particular race of evil aliens had captured many humans from earth and sprinkled them throughout the galaxy to use as slaves. So most of the folks you encounter are human. And most of them speak English, albeit with some interesting variations [...]

When I was in my late teens or early 20s, I was at in Portland, Oregon, which had the best magazine selection in the city in those days, and I picked up a copy of a magazine called . The magazine had a hole in it, and a card insert with just a black spot on it, both of which were part of that particular issue’s design. I liked it. The subtitle was: “A Journal of the Mental Environment,” or something similarly boldly rhetorically Structuralist. I was surprised. I was excited. The articles were different, advocated for political agency in a way different than any I’d experienced. I felt that naïve vitality that, at 31, seems more and more difficult to kindle. Today, I find Adbusters kind of stupid. Its lefty academicese smacks of the do-nothing superiority that masquerades as contemporary liberal revolutionary spirit. Honestly, Adbusters and your flock, what [...]

Dear an hour north the trees are already shuttered leaves whip my face and the lake is lashed to whitewash while back home our initials grow dim erosion smoothes cement and names and your lover writes me letters detailing your predilections in colored pencils asking for friendship I suppose she does you well out here in the forest the season is brewing and no one minds the strange accent the new girl wears around her neck with a cross our senses shatter on punctuation and dropped Roman vowels streetlights and shadows follow sirens deep into the maze of named streets while here a fox has been eating chickens one by one in the skeleton night where once a shiv of moon grew flat on our lake while snow fell and held the light Related Posts Insomnia “Via” by Amy Lawless Could Eros be kept Tangent Writing Prompt Patter Read More [...]