Poetry

    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…

Recommendation: Pireeni Sundaralingan depicts a straightforward urgency in everything she writes. She is from Sri Lanka, and her poetry captures elements of that country’s ethnic violence and cultural tensions. However, a credit to her and her poetry, she strives for a language that embraces a sober beauty through precision. Maybe the directness in her voice…

Recommendation: Her poetry to me seems quite brilliant. I’ve been reading her recently completed manuscript, Trip Meter, and consider it to be first-rate. How shall I put it—maybe the most forthright thing I can say is that, when it’s published, I’d be honored to write one of the blurbs for its backcover. My blurb would…