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….
1 I looked out over Mexico City's notorious skyless skies, and I looked further and the distances contracted to a fist. Diverging currents of traffic; skies without ocher and ultramarine. Over the jagged faded silhouette of the city; propane tanks perch like pigs at a trough on the rooftops. Five years ago the earthquake, five…
The two books I think I am cooking up are: 1. Thingsomeness. Orthodox verse (villanelles, etc.) plus some less orthodox experiments in sound repetition (e.g., borzoi and for joy, echo and threshold). 2. Brass and Percussion: Pros Songs. Derived somewhat frmo classical Greek (“logaedic”) and Chinese fu models (Pound includes the…
My pale inner left arm pierced, and withdrawn; the sweat-heated pillow flattened under my neck; I lay and fingered my mental parts. A draft stirred the red curtain: a figure at the foot of the bed, observing like a brother. Not much trace of him, before our trouble. . . But I needed nothing there….
Without shadow there is no form. —Laura Gilpin What if Shadow should ever leave you? Then you would have no cover, no completion. Naked, you would have no darkness In which to renew your lost pride. Shadow follows for safe voyages. When Shadow speaks, revelation Echoes from watchful, hidden silence. Shadow is darkness caressing light….
After the Lenigrad trials, after solitary confinement most of eleven years in a Siberian gulag, he told us this story. One slice of sour black bread a day. He trimmed off the crust and saved it for the last since it was the best part. Crunchy, even a little sweet. Then he crumbled the slice…
I don't stay in town long. I drive out to Race Point— bright stunt kites, diving and sailing in the stiff north wind, and people walking the beach. The sea's sunny and dark. I drive on, down to Herring Cove, park, and walk the beach myself. A man and woman are fishing. “What do you…
‘The Excavation', ‘History’, and ‘Meurig Dafydd to His Mistress' are three poems from what I hope will be a continuing sequence of alternative monologues. That is to say, personae poems in which a different version of myth or history is adumbrated. As Euripides once stressed, Helen did not necessarily end up in Troy!. Absurd those…
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