These notebook entries come from my most recent volume of Fragments, a series of spiral-bound commonplace books I've been keeping for (and to) myself since 1950. These twenty-eight entries (of the three-hundred-some written in 1987) come from typically various sectors of my interests at the time. I selected these present entries in the sequence they…
Today my love feels Italian, reminiscent of, blood spilled between the Austrian and Franco-Sardinian armies at Magenta, bluer and deeper than Harvard crimson. Captain Caprilli is yet to be born to instruct the cavalry. The rider is still an encumbrance to the horse. I drink espresso in the little café with its back to the…
Afterward, it sent me back to that passage in Chaucer about the birds that slepen al the nyght with open ye, and pretty soon that made me think of another passage, in Coleridge, about nightingales perched giddily on blossomy twigs, their eyes both bright and full. It wasn't long, though, before I thought of a…
MASTHEAD Coordinating Editor for This Issue Gerald Stern Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor / Associate Fiction Editor Don Lee Associate Poetry Editor Joyce Peseroff Office Manager Jessica Dineen Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Thanks this issue to: Kevin Supples; our poetry readers Christopher Wysocki, Rafael Campo, Tom Laughlin, Bill Keeney, Doina Iliescu, Janet Choi, Karen…
I've believed from the beginning, when I was just a kid writer, that part of the poet's task was to break the rules of language, to free it from the burdens of its history, thus acknowledging that history and revivifying it. It's some such sense that underpins the poem “These Days.” Cross from the Race…
You want me to know I'm keeping memories so you unlatch a few. The future's in there too but badly restrained like an actress so intently fastened on her cue: “pocketknife”—that she stumbles out on “doctor's wife” and has to be mistaken for the maid, then chased out so as not to interrupt the kiss….
This time, Death is rising, waving its big bird wing, anthracite plume, smoke and smudge of a twilit sky E. A. Poe would have delighted in. Along the river lights spread, bridges sway into brilliance, it's all so sudden, like coming out of anesthesia, gates opening, ascent and arrival, the elevator lifting suavely into consciousness….
Earlier in this century, literary magazines would occasionally publish "work-in-progress" issues to show interesting new work, often (as in a famous instance by Joyce) experimental, while it was still in the making. The main purpose — to put it another way — was to present relatively self-contained portions of longer works whose overall structure and…
The month is August, but the day is October, and under the overhang of this expensive house, the windsock's rainbow- colored tentacles dawdle like a cuttle- fish's in the bright, dry breeze. A boy I've never seen before, whose mother loves him too well for his sweet, uncomplicated face; the new, warm smell of his…
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