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…
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…
24 may dear brenda, i have three mfa letters to write; lately i have been obliging all my students to write on the same schedule, which means i have one week of very hard work, followed by, or interspersed with, three weeks of anxious leisure, in which i wonder what i ought to do with…
One way to look at it is this: the spiritual history of European communism is divided evenly into two parts by the name of Moses Hess. And the essay Uber das Geldwesen (On the Essential Nature of Money) is nothing less than the watershed which divides it. Ernst Bloch has famously distinguished two currents in…
I could remember a big black car bumping my dog Skippy's head on the highway when I was seven years old. Skippy didn't die, but he went insane. I remember hearing dogs howl in the Sacramento Delta migrant camp where I grew up, accurately signaling someone's death the day after. When I was ten, I…
i Thrusting from the head of Picasso's goat are bicycle handlebars. They don't represent anything, but they are goat's horns, as night is a black bat, metaphorically. Come into the garden. . . . . .the black bat night has flown. Metaphor, like the night, is an idea in flight; potentially, a story: There was…
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