Great things begin In the periphery. Meanwhile my father Works third shift At the mustard plant. He’s around my age. He’s finished For the night. He revs his truck, Waiting for the heat. The ladder shakes In its rack on top. The heat is dusty, Coming on. All this Can happen Without us, just Out…
“The evident shift of pronoun (what I now mean by ‘we’) is a clear question about place.” —J. H. Prynne “Don’t talk about it—be about it.” —Busta Rhymes I’ve somehow hummed myself to your darling world. I would do if you weren’t bent on the sods where you ran me human & blew towns unwise…
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…
Then I wouldn’t prefer the California wine, its big sugar, big fruit rolling down my tongue, a cornucopia spilled across a tacky tablecloth. I’d prefer the French, its smoke and rot. Said Cézanne: Le monde—c’est terrible! Which means, The world—it bites the big weenie. People sound smarter in French. The Japanese prefer the crescent moon…
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…
“I hate what I come from,” says my cousin Shoshana, 22, jawing per always, feather earrings tangling in her light brown hair. Shoshana hangs on to Kinesha, her kid, to stop her running off. Our cousin Deb’s wedding just got out; we’re standing at the bottom of the wedding hall steps. “White people don’t have…
Clearing by this afternoon, and I know you just want to have a good time. Okay, I’ll try to work with that. Out here in the field, then, with this frontier we carry around, there’s no difficulty. It can all be explained: We’re here in the scrub with our broken hearts and the insects,…
When people smoked, and it hung over the table like magic or like wisps of the talk and the music between them, chicken bones, the best Chateaux, Coca-Cola in glass, Monk’s eyes cut left, Ornette laughing at something off-camera, safari suit and Savile Row bespoke, haberdashery circa ’72 and the black globe is damn near…
A. H. Gorson, 1872–1933 “The Pittsburgh School,” his colleagues called This way of painting the city—river and mill yard And wharf—massed shapes laid against the light That showered up, impasto, from their midst, The way forms dissolved or were cast into relief Or grew more massive in the general noon. Unlike other tonal painters, he…
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