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…
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…
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."…
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