Poetry

My Translation

I am translating the world into mockingbird, into blue jay,     into cat-bombing avian obbligato, because I want more noise, more bells, more senseless tintinnabulation,     more crow, thunder, squawk, more bird song, more Beethoven, more philharmonic mash notes to the gods.     I am translating the world into onyx, into Abyssinian, into pale-blue Visigoth…

Questiones

Of Memory I. Messala Corvinus forgot his own name  II. One, by a blow with a stone, forgot all his learning. Another, by a fall from a horse, forgot his mother’s name and kinfolk. A young student of Montpellier, by a wound, lost his memory, so that he was fain to be taught the letters…

Burrowing Creatures

Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat     There’s a poem I’m always trying to write. It always begins the same way.     Oh, listen, listen—     It is the urgency of the words that compels me. I know what the poem is about, it’s about the world and its shining. But what comes after these words is…

The Man from Mars vs. It

Standing off a bit, I watch one of them fly out of its form, so clenched up on its own that it does not understand the wash, the river carved into its underground. When it is here or there, it is always somewhere else, an optic hop away from the housecat moving slowly towards the…

A Warm Day

If the dog were a cloud, he could run through blue pastures, and never catch his hair on a fence. He could leap at other clouds and they would not growl or bite. He could retrieve the sun, which would glow in his mouth, and light up all his teeth. And how pleased his mistress…

Lot’s Wives

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…

Explication de texte

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…