A Green Crab’s Shell Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like– though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws’ gesture of menace and power. A gull’s gobbled…

So there’s always this double duty, neither to make the best the enemy of the good, nor to make the good the enemy of the best. Scylla and Charybdis. The reason I admire Johnson and Eliot and Empson so much – the thing that holds them together – is that they all think that doing the right thing is steering between two equally dangerous opposite bad things. Do you remember that Eliot was billed as giving a talk on ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ and he’d realized that they’d simply misunderstood. That is, when he was asked what he was going to talk about, he’d said that these things were always a matter of Scylla and Charybdis and so forth, and this became the title of the talk so that we got a talk on this subject because they’d slightly misunderstood what he was saying. But it’s true to him. And Samuel [...]

Apologies for the pseudo self-promotion — if you’re free this evening, 8pm, come to CPR – Center for Performance Research, 361 Manhattan Ave (Brooklyn) for Projection: featuring Star Black, Stephen Motika, Brenda Shaughnessy and Danniel Schoonebeek

I’m sitting up in bed, or on the couch, as it were, where I have been trying to sleep off the slew of vodka-and-tonics I downed last night at our reading here in Portland. Shawn Vandor, whose Fire at the end of the rainbow was just , and I read at . Happily I had the chance to meet and fraternize with thethe’s own . Happily too I have had the chance to experience a temperate spring. In my new adopted home we have a desert spring, which is an entirely different beast. Anyway, it’s been good to see green grass against mud and cherry trees in blossom. All of this reminds me of the wonderful lineage of cold muddy spring poems. There’s ‘Spring and All’ By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the waste [...]

comments on : Journalistic standards have changed so drastically that, when I took the podium at the film circle’s dinner and quoted Pauline Kael’s 1974 alarm, “Criticism is all that stands between the public and advertising,” the gala’s audience responded with an audible hush—not applause. Over recent years, film journalism has—perhaps unconsciously—been considered a part of the film industry and expected to be a partner in Hollywood’s commercial system. Look at the increased prevalence of on-television reviewing dedicated to dispensing consumer advice, and of magazine and newspaper features linked only to current releases, or to the Oscar campaign, as if Hollywood’s business was everybody’s business. Critics are no longer respected as individual thinkers, only as adjuncts to advertising. We are not. And we should not be. Criticism needs to be reassessed with this clear understanding: We judge movies because we know movies, and our knowledge is based on learning and [...]

Ben Luzzatto’s THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, ABRIDGED (UDP, 2010) is one of those rare artifacts that transfers its own actual magic—and it is real magic—until the possessed begins to lift a bit toward the sky. Ugly Duckling Presse has been summed up quite well as “a publishing collective specializing in experimental poetry and new editions of forgotten textual artist, producing lovely, cheeky books by authors you’ve probably never heard of but your grandchildren will likely read in college…a nesting ground for swans of the avant-garde poetry scene.” It’s true that I do feel personally attached to many titles UDP has produced (such as or ). THEORY is the most recent in its Dossier Series, which produced the wonderfully heady though deadly pretentious , and soon will bring out Dottie Lasky’s . When I first held this particular book though, I do what I do with most books, hold it open [...]

A. People talking without speaking People hearing without listening People writing songs that voices never share… -Paul Simon Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds…. -Vladimir Nabokov To my wife Anne, without whose silence this book never would have been written. -Philip K. Dick, dedication page from The Man in the High Castle B. If you place two or more people in a lobby, they will produce words that string together discussions regarding recent changes in weather. If you put one person in a lobby, he or she will hum a tune no one–not even he or she–knows, atonally and incessantly. C. This is a cat named Silence. He meows at the door as I write this. Silence on "Silence" by John Cage In the Brooklyn apartment where Silence lives, a man came to look at a room for [...]

I’ve decided to change my strategy for blogging through Grossman. Not only is it almost impossible to try and successfully capture the first part of the book in any systematic way (the conversation shifts too rapidly and it’s almost maddening to trace any idea), but the second part is so lovely and systematically broken down, that I keep gravitating toward it. So I’ll leave the first part of the book for those of you who desire to read it (very much worth it). Instead I’ll be blogging through Grossman’s “Summa Lyrica,” which is the second part of The Sighted Singer. Grossman begins his Summa by speaking about immortality: The function of poetry is to obtain for everybody one kind of success at the limits of the autonomy of will….The limits of the autonomy of the will discovered in poetry are death and the barriers against the access to other consciousnesses….The [...]



Stomach Teeth remain but lips do not. A flattened pouch filled With a jackal-headed god’s Crumbs, a steady and tasteless Nourishing, until again the Lips burn, hungry for fowl In the infinite field of reeds. Lungs Tree dismantled. One half On top the other, losing pink Quickly. A baboon’s snout Blows the new air of a god Inside and during the rise Twin sponge-roots relearn To expand, contract, expand. Intestines The longest road of the body Is watched by a hawk-faced god Who flies the Nile’s length In two wing-beats, collects Water in his beak and returns The river’s still blue coolness To the driest coil of flesh. Liver The usefulness of what’s left Behind—blessed by the hands of A god with a human face, wide-eyed And mindful. Four parts, four winds Stilled, the kind of silence needed To end and begin. To make venom Essential, to warm again the [...]

Below are some candid photos I’ve taken of Poetryland’s Personalities. “One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes… Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.” Mark Strand, Star Black & John Ashbery Mark Strand John Ashbery & David Lehman Harold Bloom Timothy Donnelly Richard Howard Christian Hawkey & Dara Wier Christian Hawkey James Tate Ruth Stone Frank O’Hara’s grave Lucie Brock-Broido & Tree Swenson Paul Mariani anonymous poet Adam Zagajewski John Yau John Ashbery (iPhone wallpaper) Christopher Ricks Linda Gregg Hart [...]

Late again. I’m at work, greedily eating the seeds of the last pomegranate in Manhattan (so far as I’ve checked below 14th St) and I bid a wistful farewell to pomegranate season. And naturally, I’m thinking about Persephone (who paid dearly for my lunch) and all this leads me here: Pomegranate Louise Glück First he gave me his heart. It was red fruit containing many seeds, the skin leathery, unlikely. I preferred to starve, bearing out my training. Then he said Behold how the world looks, minding your mother. I peered under his arm: What had she done with color & odor? Whereupon he said Now there is a woman who loves with a vengeance, adding Consider she is in her element: the trees turning to her, whole villages going under although in hell the bushes are still burning with pomegranates. At which he cut one open & began to [...]

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.