Little lady of the Welcome Wagon in the suburb I now call home, I waited eight months to hear your voice chirping across my telephone, and when you came, and when you came, I heard your wings flap you away before I could reach my door to see what love sent you here, and why….
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Jane Shore Associate Poetry Editor James Richardson Editor for Fiction Supplement DeWitt Henry Associate Fiction Editors John Domini David Gullette James Randall Ellen Wilbur CONTRIBUTORS TOM ABSHER teaches in the Adult Degree Program at Goddard College and was awarded an NEA fellowship in 1976….
With its boarded-up windows At the end of a dead-end street, In the dead of winter, A huge, grim institution I return to, I have unfinished Business to complete With its night-nurses, And other shadowy hirelings. * * * At daybreak, darkly, When the doors of its emergency entrance Flap across The line of vision, From…
1. I keep listening. Where are the words? I wander between stations. The damnation of the beloved Keeps me in fascination. Who shall be made real? 2. Will you arrive With your soft dresses Rolled away in your suitcase? Will you speak elegantly of clouds, Of forgotten shapes? Will you tell me with your subtlety…
The following interview took place on two occasions in July of this year at my apartment in Cambridge. Bill Knott drank instant iced tea, as is his custom, and talked easily once we had started. Knott is the author of nine books of poems, most of them published by small presses, beginning with the Naomi…
They were naked and the earth Was covered with light snow. They squatted and said nothing. The children appeared asleep. It got dark and they were still there: On a vast plain without landmarks, Under a sky the color of slate and lead, On an evening in late December. I’m told, but do not believe,…
Once words stunned the field, like sudden rain, as if Rain were the name of a woman, whose eyes drenched yours alive in the full torrent of saying exactly what she wanted to say. Then husbandry took over: the dry stare of a dry bush, piling one odd rock on top of another odd rock…
* I first read some poems of Bill Knott's in magazines nearly 10 years ago, in the Fall of 1967. I was a sophomore in college. I remember being stunned by the passion and mystery of the poems. At that time I'd only been reading contemporary poetry with any direction for a year or so…
Not a line, not a glimpse, not a second. Every eye no more inhabited than a fish. The fat on the old woman’s arm hangs like a white sloth from the limb of a tree as she airs her dentures in a tenement yawn. Eyeless, we raise our hands in greeting and touch against the…
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