Nonfiction

Asked what he worked at, Oscar Wilde's brother Willie would reply, "At intervals." This kind of innocuous controlled explosion which sends a phrase sky-high the moment before it reassembles, younger and wiser and apparently unfazed, is analogous to the effect achieved by certain poems. It defamiliarizes, yes, but mostly in order to refamiliarize. It glamorizes…

There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca . . . . I distinctly remember wondering, stroll- ing the bright and un-blasted streets, why it was that all the other American cities weren't depopulated now that their young people were free once again to get up…

Déconstruction est passée, as they say on the Champs-Elysées. One mirror facing another inside a mirrored sphere spins scintillations too tiny and brief to illuminate the unetherized body slabbed for autopsy. Deconstruction is reflective, but of what? Of collective despair, some scholars think. Though we each push our own hopes before us like wheel-barrows through…

The original intention of editing an issue of Ploughshares was a collection of dramatic verse, either written directly for theatrical performance or adaptable for the stage. There were few submissions. Instead, resolutely lyrical poems came, altering intention. There are many names I would have liked to see here, but the pleasures of discovery of new…

Thirty-seven years after publication of the first Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams, New Directions has given us a new one. In 1949 Williams himself did the selecting, and Randall Jarrell was called upon to provide an introduction. Charles Tomlinson, an Englishman who did not "seriously begin to read Williams until 1956-his Desert Music and…

I A Contradiction of Fundamental Logic "If the motion of the world aimed at a final state, that state would have been reached," Nietzsche writes in Will To Power (#708). To build a poetics upon that notion, as John Ashbery has done, is to insist upon its corollary, the notion of eternal return. It is…

In one of his poems, Wallace Stevens leaves us a record of the writer as connoisseur, imposing order on chaos, and, on the other hand, deliberately upsetting the established order. Elizabeth Sewell, in The Structure of Poetry, views the process of writing poems as a mediation between extremes from logic to nightmare. And these polarities…

I have a photograph of my father wearing a black tuxedo and holding a suckling pig under his arm. He's on stage. Two dark-eyed beauties in low-cut party dresses are standing next to him and giggling. He's laughing too. The pig has its mouth open, but it doesn't look like it's laughing. It's New Year's…

Yesterday at the supermarket I overheard a man and a woman discussing narrative poetry. She said: "Perhaps all so-called narrative poems are merely ironic, their events only pointing out how impoverished we are, how, like hopeless utopians, we live for the end. They show that our lives are invalidated by our needs, especially the need…