Not long ago I accompanied a Trappist abbot as he unlocked a door to the cloister and led me down a long corridor into a stone-walled room, the chapter house of his monastery, where some twenty monks were waiting for me to give a reading. Poetry does lead a person into some strange places. This…
Cold. Wet. Sloppy. Traffic on the bridge is heavy even though I waited for morning rush hour to end. Perhaps there is no end to rush hour. Fax. E-mail. Supersonic jets. We’re all racing at greater and greater speeds, going around and around, stuck behind each other on the bridge. Except Mom, who in her…
A bitter Wichita, Kansas, winter day. The air is hard, and everything tempted to appear in an afternoon hour or two of tepid sunlight moves with recognition of that hardness, circles overhead as if turning an adamant mill wheel (crows), or raises a lavish tail the shape-and I would swear the brittleness-of the ice-fronds on…
Because I immigrated to the States from Croatia at the age of twenty, people often ask me why I write in English rather than in Croatian. I give a silly answer that it’s owing to my Achilles’ heel that I do. The less silly-but not tragic-answer takes longer, even though it might start just as…
We are the Holocaust Girls The Holocaust Girls, the Holocaust Girls We are the Holocaust Girls, We like to dig in the dark. -to the tune of “Lullaby League and Lollypop Guild,” from The Wizard of Oz 1. You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Holocaust Girl. But it helps. It…
At twenty, he has square feet and wide bones and thick coarse hair; a smile that, while slow, is generous. You want to pet him. From all the bulk and fur of him you wouldn’t expect his hands, magician hands. Quick. He draws caricatures in charcoal, plays Bach on guitar, juggles bean-bags, and folds colored…
he house on a dirt road, a stream running by it. In the dream I am always fighting to stay. Someone tries to move me out, an ex-love, someone who thinks my things should remain in boxes, someone who would knock down a wall, make guest rooms, “brighten the place up a bit.”…
“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…
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