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Questiones

Of Memory I. Messala Corvinus forgot his own name  II. One, by a blow with a stone, forgot all his learning. Another, by a fall from a horse, forgot his mother’s name and kinfolk. A young student of Montpellier, by a wound, lost his memory, so that he was fain to be taught the letters…

Hello, I Must Be Going

    I’m sitting in a London lecture theater and thinking of my mother, dead just these three weeks—     and by the way, reader, this will not, repeat, not, be one more crappy poem about a dying mother!—     as I listen to Dr. David Parker speaking on “Love and Death in Dickens,” how the…

On Sarah Maclay

Ms. Maclay has a superb lyric gift, a remarkable imagistic clarity, and a constant sense of invention. Her recent prose poems—a departure for her—strike me as some of the most gracious and compelling of the genre. She is melding the concerns of her more fiercely lyric pieces with a more elongated music phrasing, and the…

Suite (to Hoku)

A poem is a room that contains the house it’s in, the way you accommodate me when I lie beside you, even if the address is lost so many times and the names of streets are strangers that pass shuffling a card-deck of maps whose rubber band has snapped: still beyond all chance or choice…

On Patrick Michael Finn

I’m proud to nominate Patrick Michael Finn, one of my most accomplished, prolific former students and one of my favorite writers. Mr. Finn remains someone I talk about quite often, though he graduated in 1997, and someone whose stories have never left my mind. I still remember his characters—lonely Joliet teenagers struggling with religion and…

The Man from Mars vs. It

Standing off a bit, I watch one of them fly out of its form, so clenched up on its own that it does not understand the wash, the river carved into its underground. When it is here or there, it is always somewhere else, an optic hop away from the housecat moving slowly towards the…