The night Sam Cooke was shot, I ran out into the backyard and shouted, “Suck my dick, God!” My father slapped my face, said if he ever heard me say anything like that again, I could forget about driving, ever— I'd be in my own house with my own kids and he'd show up to…
Last summer, composer Ben Yarmolinsky, whom I had never met, called me with the idea of my writing a libretto about the eleven o'clock news, called NewsSongs, commissioned by American Opera Projects. After we agreed on a basic structure, I proceeded to write the text, then-titled Blind Witness NewsSpiel, which is printed here. It differs…
The libretto of The Singers of Lesbos, a two-act opera set in 590 B.C., is very much a work-in-progress, because the composer is still to be chosen. Although I expect to change the libretto in various ways to suit my composer, the set poetic pieces reproduced here should stay much the same. They comprise two…
Pappy died, I flew home, sat on the same old couch holding my mother's head to my breast, the skull for later beneath the frizzy perm: haunch of a starving lamb. No hole, no stone: smoke, a few words for the assembled testimonial few, too much bourbon not enough dry turkey then backwards in the…
When the Peep-O-Day Boys were laying fire down in the hay-ricks and seed-barns of their Catholic neighbours, the art of portrait-painting reached its height across the water. The fire caught. The flames cracked and the light showed up the scaffold and the wind carried staves of a ballad, the flesh-smell of hatred. And she climbed…
One morning in late January 1990 I realized I had never written an out-and-out valentine. I also kept regretting I'd never written a valentine for Raymond Carver. What kind of poet and lover was I, anyway, I was feeling. It's true I'd tried to live my valentine, but still—no valentines. Was it my working-class avoidance…
This happened just once. Desire had stopped at some remote crossroads. I don't know whose heart just stood there without an owner. It was one of those little folds in time when the absurd moon could rise without a purpose. We all knew where melancholy could lurk in ravines, or even lie sprawled out by…
These notebook entries come from my most recent volume of Fragments, a series of spiral-bound commonplace books I've been keeping for (and to) myself since 1950. These twenty-eight entries (of the three-hundred-some written in 1987) come from typically various sectors of my interests at the time. I selected these present entries in the sequence they…
Today my love feels Italian, reminiscent of, blood spilled between the Austrian and Franco-Sardinian armies at Magenta, bluer and deeper than Harvard crimson. Captain Caprilli is yet to be born to instruct the cavalry. The rider is still an encumbrance to the horse. I drink espresso in the little café with its back to the…
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