Sometime in the early 1880s a medical doctor named Israel Wood Powell, superintendent for Indian Affairs for Coastal Indians in British Columbia, collected a raven rattle from the Tshimshian Indians. He sent the rattle to The American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where it remains. It is a percussive musical instrument, used…
. . . The border Halves a piece of paper into here and hereafter. A man, himself a fascicle of borders, draws a map and can't stop drawing For fear of bleeding, smudging, disappearance. When the map is complete the page will be completely Obscured by detail, then a third howl. Three things…
translated by Olga Broumas and T. Begley Whether you have written poems or not isn’t as important as whether you have suffered, been impassioned, longed for what leads, by hook or by crook, to Poetry. The wind of life hits you before its material body, as the aroma of a woman before her actual presence….
She comes out in a white suit of stovepipe pants and short tight jacket and, under the jacket, dark lingerie. She has the habit of throwing her head back and laughing, revealing the split at her two front teeth. Her lips are cherry red and her hair white (for now) and she makes, together with…
In the cultural shake-up of the last decade, it has become increasingly popular to attack both the academy and poetry. The assaults on the university have come from both sides of the aisle: new ethnic and group definitions have led to strong progressive critiques of what were taken to be standard curricula and established canons….
"A poem," said Richard Hugo, "should happen in a heart-wrenching moment, quick, dramatic." Not a bad description of himself. Richard Hugo "happened" in the years I knew him. He happened in quick, dramatic, heart-wrenching moments as a teacher and mentor and man. As a poet, he reverberated; he got you "kicking the loose gravel home."…
I Decision to go abroad. My dearest friend and my latest love. A Proustian party. A night in Vermont. Meaning to stay as long as possible, I sailed for Europe. It was March 1950. New York and most of the people I knew had begun to close in. Or to put it differently, I felt…
When New Yorkers said "train" it meant the subway. As in Count Basie's "Take the ‘A’ Train," you took the "train" to go downtown to Greenwich Village, or uptown to Columbia on Morningside Heights. I took the IRT line to the local stop at 116th and Broadway and got off there to go to college….
What draws us to poetry in our early, inarticulate years? Answers to the question must vary. From the days when, as a child, I passively absorbed poetry from songs and hymns and when, as an adolescent, I tried to cobble together my own verses, nudged onto paper in imitation of poems from books, I recall…
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