for B.W. and P.T.D. In wet fields the farmers’ cramped hands clutch fast to their hoes. We tumble through stone-colored flesh. All night the plane floating up over the oceans, unknown lives passing through us. So many. Barely enough time to say the names. Gone, as if taken by a huge gray hand entering a…
In Portland, every once in a while, one encounters A dying gull, eyes milky as clams, Lying on a patch of grass or safe gutter, Shivering with death fever, black back And white breast dotted over With stationary yet excited flies Drunk on salt and the heaving propinquity Of deathly fresh fowl flesh, and here…
In many ways, Robert Boswell fits the mythology of the contemporary man in the American West. Known as Boz, he’s a lanky, laconic six-footer with a closely cropped beard. Typically garbed in jeans and rumpled shirts with rolled-up sleeves, he drives a pickup truck and listens to Bruce Springsteen. He lives in an adobe house…
Late June, dusk in Paris, a man found you, unaccompanied, on a park bench. Slouched, chin on chest, gaze fixed at the brick fountain, its white tumbling spires, you were the man from the night before. At the concert hall, you’d played that long instrument, lean and ebony with silver keys, like a stretched saxophone,…
Not night now, not the night’s one chilling vocable of sharp air, not the cross parental babble of it burning your infant ear, not anything you say in answer, no good, not fair, the fiercest syllables that turn, as soon as spoken, into steam that lifts away, no, none of these is the beloved in…
When asked about her poetic influences, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s answer is somewhat surprising, but delivered with typical certitude. “Bach and, later, Brahms.” It was the pure forms of music from which she started; poetry was, as she tells it, a sort of accident, something she happened on to late in her undergraduate career at Converse…
In Paris, Vallejo’s hotel near the Bibliothèque Nationale charges a hundred a night, and Ginsberg’s seedy room on the rue Git-le-coeur sports flowered wallpaper now, and a couple of Michelin stars. Cabourg’s Grand Hôtel on the chilly Normandy coast, nearly driven from business by the sunny “costas” of Spain, rents “Chambre Marcel Proust” for twice…
After I flung you down at last onto the bed because it was two a.m. and you’d been crying for hours, it seemed, and would not stop, all my comforting defeated, spent; because you were too frantic by then to say what it was you wanted, sobbing too much to say it, though you kept…
Rita Dove, The Darker Face of the Earth, a play: Dove’s adaptation of Oedipus to a Southern plantation in 1840 premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this past summer, and this second edition reflects major changes made to the script as it was brought to the stage. (Story Line)
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