“Ages with a highly developed decorum find verse a relatively easy medium. Recent ages have clearly a low decorum and have run toward prose.” -R. P. Blackmur, 1951 Imagine what Blackmur would have said about our age, circa 1994. Toward what does an age run with almost no decorum? Toward self-indulgence and the collapse of…
I’m very worried when I see the boy from my writing workshop, gloomy Chico Lopez, strolling down St. Mary’s Street with Julio, who used to live next door. This looks like a bad connection. They’re talking busily with their heads together, carrying sacks. I’ve never seen Chico look so animated before. Is it just that…
The fonts in all the churches are dry. I run my fingers through the dusty scallops of marble: not a drop for my hot forehead. The Tuscan July heat is invasive to the body but not to the stone churches that hold onto the dampness of winter, releasing a gray coolness slowly throughout the summer….
His erection startled me. At first, it seemed merely to point me out, acknowledging my part in nothing more than the simple and various human desires in our encounter: the desire to be loved and to be healed, the desire to be naked before another and thus to be understood utterly and to be wordlessly…
When we ran out of money, the paintings worked like magic. My father would take one down from the pair of nails it hung on and would carry it-his face close to the portrait's face-to his creditor's car. He told the few facts he had been told about the artist's life, a name changed from…
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…
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