Before I post my regularly scheduled post, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I give you an excerpt from James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and the salmonpink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man’s voice singing. He stood still in [...]

In a photograph of my father’s Rhode Island, His home describes itself in tactile, sculptural terms. A well looms. Once, I stared the photo down Till I could picture it—till the clapboard And shingles lay like any focused thought Against a pure white backdrop. Now It was an idealized beauty treated as a vision, But an abstraction unquiet in its given body— Insistant, puritanical & aware of its materials And heft—stolid and wooden. The roof joists Turn up, but return earthward decisively Like a check-mark upside-down. We staked it out when I first saw New England. My father pointed, Look at the well, it’s gone. Alexander Landfair lives on Manhattan, where he is the associate poetry editor of Narrative Magazine. He was recently a Finalist for Poetry’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship.

Micah asked me to guest-blog for a day and I said yes. It was a foolish mistake, but here I am. The format of the blog is somewhat antithetical to my natural predilection for complex and rigorous argument, for graphs and citations and all the byzantine wonder that is a well written (and mostly unpublishable) literary essay (or is that different? Do I mean an essay about literature?)—I’m rambling here, and you’re welcome. I’m doing my best to adjust to the conventions of the medium. Please forgive this paragraph break. This is a poetry blog, and I’m a poet, and I’ve written many poems and essays about poetry, so you’d think I’d be a natural choice. But the thing is, I haven’t read or written a poem in some while. And it all has to do with investment capital. Several months ago, I finished a poetry manuscript and sent it [...]

Posted in tandem with www.scatteredrhymes.com Part 1 [audio:http://www.scatteredrhymes.com/poets/ben%20mirov%201.mp3|bgcolor=0x000000] Part 2 [audio:http://www.scatteredrhymes.com/poets/ben%20mirov%202.mp3|bgcolor=0x000000] Monkey Heart Pick it up. Consider it a machine. Put it down. Remember you need it. Go back to where you left it. Airport terminal, donut shop seventh grade. Are you scared? It’s ok. So am I. Take a wet rag. Put it on your head. Let’s retrace your steps. Do you love your wife? Is she made of dolphins? I love my fucking life. Even my secrets and the terrible things I’ve done. They’re like small smooth stones in a green plastic bottle with no label. What were we doing? Driving down a long dark street? Does it feel exactly right? Little fist that pumps the blood. The flicker in your empty. — WAVE MACHINE We go out for drinks and attack a dumpster. D takes off his pants and tries to have sex with J. My lighter [...]

Congrats to Rae Armatrout, whose book VERSED won the 2010 NBCC Award. Here’s her poem “Guess”: 1 The jacaranda, for instance, is beautiful but not serious. That much I can guess. And that the view is softened by curtains. That the present moment is an exception, is the queen bee a hive serves, or else an orphan. 2 So the jacaranda is foreign and extravagant. It gestures in the distance. Between there and here you ask what game we should play next week. So we’ll be alive next week, continuing what you may or may not mean to be an impossible flirtation …and props to the brilliant and charming finalist Doug Powell, whose Wednesday night reading of “corydon & alexis” and “corydon & alexis redux” made me weep: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178536 Related Posts No related photos.

I recommend playing all the videos at the same time. Some enchanted evening You may see a stranger, you may see a stranger Across a crowded room And somehow you know, You know even then That somewhere you’ll see her Again and again. Some enchanted evening Someone may be laughin’, You may hear her laughin’ Across a crowded room And night after night, As strange as it seems The sound of her laughter Will sing in your dreams. Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons, Wise men never try. Some enchanted evening When you find your true love, When you feel her call you Across a crowded room, Then fly to her side, And make her your own Or all through your life you May dream all alone. Once you have found her, Never let her go. Once you have found her, Never let [...]

Life consists of propositions about life. —Wallace Stevens I. A certain esteemed professor requires that those enrolled in his poetry workshop meet with him in his downtown studio apartment, right off Washington Square. Once inside, the student hands over a few poems and watches the professor–clipboard in one hand, red pen in the other–scrutinize every word of every line of every stanza of each poem. At the end of the hour, the student will rise from the couch, the professor will rise from his chair, a small ancient French bulldog that has since settled, drooled and snored on either available lap (usually the student’s) will remove himself begrudgingly and resituate his arthritic corporeal freight on the floor, and fall back asleep. The student receives his or her scarred poems, exits the apartment, takes the elevator downstairs, crosses the courtyard, goes through a stone tunnel, and passes through the tall iron [...]

With the creation of one of the high achievements of mankind, Twin Peaks, David Lynch made a world so ecstatic it demanded its own reality. I’ve been really thinking about Julee Cruise and Twin Peaks SO MUCH lately. What makes it so good? Where did this music come from? Who is Julee Cruise *really*!? Why is this music so appropriate after dark? Lynch obviously takes a lot of cues from Kenneth Anger, particularly Anger’s bike films Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos. With these, Kenneth Anger added simple bubble gum pop songs over ritual cruelty and raw sexuality, (not only inventing music videos,) but also exposing basic desires as a violent, cold thing. David Lynch uses Julee Cruise in his work the same way, but also in a new way. Lynch and Badalamenti wrote the songs that she recorded for the soundtrack, which are pretty much 60′s pop songs with [...]

I’m planning on doing another entry today about Grossman, but I’m at work and I forgot my copy of Singer. In the meantime, I wanted to share a BBC series that is available on YouTube. A professor I know shared this with me, after I shared a link to . I’m sharing this video (and my e-mail response to that professor) in an attempt to balance my Grossman post from last week, lest you think I’m only a cranky traditionalist. First, the video… And my email response to this professor… an interesting set of videos. though i’m not sure i’d start where scruton starts: art being buffeted on two sides by the cult of ugliness and the cult of utility. i think that’s putting the cart before the horse, in a sense, because it implies a sort of propriety about what art should contain and what it should not. i’m [...]

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‘Crusoe in England’ was first published in The New Yorker in 1971, then later collected in ‘Geography III,’ perhaps Bishop’s finest single volume of poems. (Only recently I discovered the title of which was suggested to her by John Ashbery. He had found a little geography textbook of the eponymous name, and sent it to her, thinking she’d rather enjoy it. Turns out, she did.) I can’t help thinking ‘Crusoe in England’ is Bishop’s greatest poem, though Bishop is the type of figure who inspires worshippers, and therefore, nearly all of her poems are considered The Greatest, The Most Favorite, The Defining Classic: ‘The Fish,’ ‘At the Fishhouses,’ ‘One Art’ (which wears on me), ‘The Man-Moth,’ etc. Ashbery’s favorite is characteristically ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance.’ After reading it, he wrote Bishop his first and only fan letter and attached the poem he wrote in tribute ‘Soonest Mended.’ [...]

by Elizabeth Bishop The moon in the bureau mirror looks out a million miles (and perhaps with pride, at herself, but she never, never smiles) far and away beyond sleep, or perhaps she’s a daytime sleeper. By the Universe deserted, she’d tell it to go to hell, and she’d find a body of water, or a mirror, on which to dwell. So wrap up care in a cobweb and drop it down the well into that world inverted where left is always right, where the shadows are really the body, where we stay awake all night, where the heavens are shallow as the sea is now deep, and you love me. Share this: Related Posts more correspondence The Melody Ascends Stepwise February 15, 2010 Nothing to say

I sit with my head in the meadow and compare it to the stones In my biography I own a home I associate my home with pleasant feelings In my biography I am very sleepy I go sit on a stump and a log Sometimes for days I am moving I weep all night for my child In my biography epaulets grow in sorrow I braided them myself the golden worms And I am a horse owner I own a horse In my biography we are an island Food arrives and news and ammunition Very slowly I move to the cellar What I have buried there I still adore Heather Christle is the author of The Difficult Farm (). She grew up in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and now lives in Atlanta. More information is at .

Forgot to post yesterday. To compensate, I am typing a poem “by heart”—you may know it already, by Ms Jorie Graham… THE WAY THINGS WORK is by admitting or opening away. This is the simplest form of current: Blue moving through blue; blue through purple; the objects of desire opening upon themselves without us; the objects of faith. The way things work is by solution, resistence lessened or increased and taken advantage of. The way things work is that we finally believe they are there, common and able to illustrate themselves. Wheel, kinetic flow, rising and falling water, ingots, levers and keys, I believe in you, cylinder lock, pully, lifting tackle and crane lift your small head— I believe in you— your head is the horizon to my hand. I believe forever in the hooks. The way things work is that eventually something catches. Related Posts Tangent February 17, 2010 [...]

(Disclaimer: Ok, yes. This is a post about pens. But bear with me—I actually do have an idea here.) I found my favorite pen at home—my mother’s house in Northern Virginia. The townhouse is a small one, and is filled with thirteen years worth of the kind of stuff a family with an inclination toward a breed of boredom that stems from a general suspicion that life is meaningless accumulates when it stays in one place for long enough: Construction paper, watercolor paper, canvases, palettes, coloring books, markers, crayons, colored pencils, pastels, gauche, acrylics, water-soluble oils, oils. A flute, a piccolo, three recorders, an Irish penny whistle, a Jew’s harp, a harmonica, a kazoo or two, an old guitar. Knitting projects, beading projects, thread, needles, needlepoint, thimbles, embroidery floss of all colors, clay. Two chessboards, Scrabble, Perquacky, Yahtzee, Sorry, Past Lives, Life. The house is also full of exhausted pens. [...]