Poetry

I don't have any grand theoretical scheme into which I'm going to fit these six poems, but I know the theme I want the sequence to crystallize around. This is the hallucinatory savagery of life in New York City, the spectacular contrasts and the squalor of those caught on the margins. The sequence will also…

bound in friendship nest in a single tree. One watches the world. The other feeds on sweet fruit. The Self, weary of pecking about, sinks into despair. Through meditation, personal self comprehends impersonal self: The Spirit soars! When Sage and Spirit are united, Lingam and yoni, good and evil Vanish: they are one. Only in…

What follows comes late in a book-length sequence of poems, with some interleaved prose, that recounts one imagined life through another. The imagined life is my own, or that of a writing double that insists it is not the workaday figure who answers to my name. The other biography, and the one the sequence is…

The idea for The World Pub seemed a whimsy at first, but now I'm sure it wasn't. I fantasized a place with that name in some unspecified suburb of some unspecified metropolis, at once real and imaginary. Persons of all ranks, historical or mythical, from any time past or present or future, could be found…

No one, Herakleitos said, crosses the same river twice. True enough. Every gain's composed of losses. Think, as Robert Duncan has, of years as catches where only that which one loves well surpasses our diurnal habit of suffering and folly. Years pass, crawling into years. Too damned bad for one who worships childhood or youth….

Saint-Julien de Peyrolas Gard 18 October 1941 Mr Xavier Vallat Commissioner for Jewish Affairs Vichy Sir:      I must take you to be in some way my superior;      for while I have not yet come to grasp what now      is thought to be a Jew, I must hear the silence      that met my request, for a…

1 A morning meditation in mid-May, the plane trees profligate on this island on Broadway and 105th, ten years of morning walks along these storefronts, the beautiful names before me now, Santerellos, Erik’s Hair King, Lucky Farm Fruits and Vegetables, the urban wind in the lindens, the shock of gray-black water on the downslopes of…

A weak man is like a broken jug: although you pour in every kindness, you pour in vain: nothing is contained. *     *     * The vile mouth of the exorcist drives away demons, not by virtue of his ritual, but by the shit he speaks. *     *     * The poor painter captures only form, no other. To find the…

Sheffield Pastorals has no plot—only the interweaving of a number of themes. Each section is a cluster of self-contained, slightly discon- nected lines, in the manner of a ghazal, but unlike the ghazal all the lines of the section focus on a common subject. I don't know how many sections the poem will finally have….