The idea for The World Pub seemed a whimsy at first, but now I'm sure it wasn't. I fantasized a place with that name in some unspecified suburb of some unspecified metropolis, at once real and imaginary. Persons of all ranks, historical or mythical, from any time past or present or future, could be found…
No one, Herakleitos said, crosses the same river twice. True enough. Every gain's composed of losses. Think, as Robert Duncan has, of years as catches where only that which one loves well surpasses our diurnal habit of suffering and folly. Years pass, crawling into years. Too damned bad for one who worships childhood or youth….
Saint-Julien de Peyrolas Gard 18 October 1941 Mr Xavier Vallat Commissioner for Jewish Affairs Vichy Sir: I must take you to be in some way my superior; for while I have not yet come to grasp what now is thought to be a Jew, I must hear the silence that met my request, for a…
1 A morning meditation in mid-May, the plane trees profligate on this island on Broadway and 105th, ten years of morning walks along these storefronts, the beautiful names before me now, Santerellos, Erik’s Hair King, Lucky Farm Fruits and Vegetables, the urban wind in the lindens, the shock of gray-black water on the downslopes of…
A weak man is like a broken jug: although you pour in every kindness, you pour in vain: nothing is contained. * * * The vile mouth of the exorcist drives away demons, not by virtue of his ritual, but by the shit he speaks. * * * The poor painter captures only form, no other. To find the…
Sheffield Pastorals has no plot—only the interweaving of a number of themes. Each section is a cluster of self-contained, slightly discon- nected lines, in the manner of a ghazal, but unlike the ghazal all the lines of the section focus on a common subject. I don't know how many sections the poem will finally have….
1 I looked out over Mexico City's notorious skyless skies, and I looked further and the distances contracted to a fist. Diverging currents of traffic; skies without ocher and ultramarine. Over the jagged faded silhouette of the city; propane tanks perch like pigs at a trough on the rooftops. Five years ago the earthquake, five…
When within the impenetrable green this morning is (thicket, wicker basket), the better to hear shade in shadow, twigs and stabs of light, I shut my eyes: the mockingbird sings in threes, like Dante, ninety-eight rhymes in seventeen cantos; rocks throne to throne, imbibing; wrings out each note, scrubbing on the old washboard, lets the…
‘The Excavation', ‘History’, and ‘Meurig Dafydd to His Mistress' are three poems from what I hope will be a continuing sequence of alternative monologues. That is to say, personae poems in which a different version of myth or history is adumbrated. As Euripides once stressed, Helen did not necessarily end up in Troy!. Absurd those…
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