The aweful terror of the night. The daylight never dawning. The crows caw cawing. The phoebe’s final sounding. Day is endless. TV whining. Ads of soap. Terrored yawning. The twitching hands. The restless feet. Endless rapping. Gnashing teeth. Boredom, unforgivable sin, the Holy Ghost bends with heaviness. Haldowed maze. No diamond clear. No key. No…
Only a spider, a small missionary of sadness I swallowed somehow when I was distracted. Laughter broke easily her thin restraints, the delicate geometry of the nets but, patient architect, she drew more lines, reinforced the structure until laughter ceased. Only a small spider who came in one day of rain or of sunshine, one…
An excerpt from the poem (Scripts for the Pageant) which follows “The Book of Ephraim” (in Divine Comedies, 1976) and Mirabell: Books of Number (1978) to conclude a trilogy based upon communications through the Ouija Board. The mediums are JM and David Jackson; the princi- pal speakers, W.H. Auden, Maria Mitsotáki (“Maman”), and the archangel…
I always thought I wanted to be somebody else anyway. There’s no good reason. I walked the same block a hundred times, a hundred times waiting and hoping for a dejavu, a hundred times. There’s no good explanation—like the time Susan told me she was pregnant and her baby was going to be half black….
Gaunt Immortality, in your golds and blacks, Consoler hideously laureled, who makes Death into a maternal bosom, loving— Pious device and ruse; marvelous lie! Who does not know, and who does not deny That skull’s infinite hollow, vacant and laughing. Deep fathers, heads untenanted and full, Who under the weight of so much spaded soil,…
When Judas writes the history of SOLITUDE,— . . . let him celebrate Miss Mary Kenwood; who, without help, placed her head in a plastic bag, then locked herself in a refrigerator. * * * —Six months earlier, after thirty years teaching piano, she had watched her mother slowly die of throat cancer. Watched her want…
I stood in front of City Lights the other afternoon. Allen Ginsberg had just dropped off a manuscript called “Howl.” Lawrence let me read it. I thought it was quite good. Bob Kaufman tried to punch me, but I don’t think he particularly disliked the manuscript. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady drove up. Neal was…
1. Danny in the Hospital after visiting Danny in the hospital I walk to Chapel Street. The crazy teenagers stand in front of the Mall, in the cold. White girls flirt with the black boys. One girl is fat and has strange speech. The black girls call out something I don’t catch. he has gotten…
Sometime in the early 1960’s, Robert Lowell began to collaborate with Leonard Bernstein on Bernstein’s third symphony, Kaddish. Three poems were written before the collaboration was broken off. Bernstein in the end wrote his own text. Lowell’s three poems are published here for the first time. I Brothers, we glory in this blinding hour, our…
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