January 2012
3 posts
3 tags
The hip gentry
love like mad mad like love some people don’t like poetry, it can all seem so very frivolous when the bodies stack up, when the earthquake rumbles and decimates and sighs its resignation, when chance or a hard-on has left you with a bullet in your side, odes and sonnets just aren’t hip let’s face it they are the flowery enemies of the very market forces that forever seek out the hip in dumpsters,...
December 2011
9 posts
3 tags
Insomnia
She stormed into the dimly-lit study in her sleep shorts and baggy grey sweatshirt drenched in sweat, brandishing the intricately woven web of string, feather, and beads. She shook it violently above her head as if it had a neck that could be strangled. “You said this would work, Jay!” A single feather fell from the ornate piece as she glared at her husband’s tired face, careless of what she may...
3 tags
Catullus 85
I hate and I love. Maybe you need to know why?
I don’t know, but it happens. I feel it, ripping me apart. - Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84 BC – ca. 54 BC) - trans. by James Esch
3 tags
Sonnet for Papa
I think of you and tendrils of despair entwine my heart. It chokes and gasps for breath and yet I know your cold chair remains bare – will stay that way. How personal is death? It never knew you like I did and yet it came. Attacked. Left stone that aged and cracked and weeds that sprout, transcend, can’t pay the debt to bring you back and so they grown and smack your grave. Ensnare my heart....
3 tags
whiteout
leaves limply curl like hands in death donut glazed with frosty tips
sleet patters tiny pin drops forcing limbs to kiss the ground white crushed lungs from avalanches never threshed
like amphibians our bloodstreams slow bitter winds cover our entwined tracks with snow unmarked graves surrender glints from glassy eyes
- Meredith Madigosky
3 tags
Tall Order
I work as a secretary at a university, and one of my faculty members came into the office to get his mail. We have the typical office mail slots with each professor’s name on the front in alphabetical order. I explained to him that we were getting new mailboxes. He protested because he is over 6’5” and his mailbox is at the bottom; the slots should not be done alphabetically, but by height.
I...
3 tags
The Echo
May
J.F.K. is dead. Judy Garland, Osama Bin Laden, King James, Chaucer, Hitler, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Nostradamus, all dead, like a trillion others. So am I, but don’t ask if I’ve seen your long lost great uncle or anything. It’s not like that. There’s just foliage out here; vague images and dark outlines in the passing windows, a lot of roadway.
I drive a 95 Nissan Sentra, and it’s an...
3 tags
Holiday Traditions
Many Christmas traditions have to do with food.
For instance, how about the day that someone was eating popcorn and decided, “Gee, let me get out my needle and thread and put this on a string instead of eating it; hence, I can stick it on the tree in my living room so the white of the popcorn really brings out the green needles on the tree.”
What about those gingerbread men? Why are they in...
November 2011
2 posts
The Things We Carry
lareviewofbooks:
JOCELYN HEANEY on teaching in a community college and the talk about higher education.
Soldier Reading a Book © JoAnn S. Makinano
Marjorie Garber The Use and Abuse of Literature
Pantheon Books, 2011. 283 pp. Geoffrey Galt Harpham The Humanities and the Dream of America
University of Chicago Press, 2011. 256 pp.
Mike wouldn’t sit with his back to the door: “I can never...
October 2011
1 post
“There’s a time to go to the typewriter. It’s like a dog: the way a dog before it...”
– Edward Albee (via theparisreview)
September 2011
4 posts
5 tags
6 tags
The Consequences of Writing Without Reading →
fwriction:
Buzz Poole takes a look at a question which has haunted my creative writing teaching life: How can you want to write when you don’t read?
This piece follows up on one by Macy Halford over at The Book Bench, and it’s a good one.
I make this analogy for students who tell me they want to write but dislike reading (it works for the young writers, anyway): You tell me you want to be...
3 tags
Sonnet 17
- Graham Macdonald
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Lunch With Louie
The demon that regularly assaults Steven Mayer returns in full force this night at 2:32. Shame, as Steven names it, rouses him before he can mobilize his defense strategy.
Knowing that the Army advocates attempting to escape as soon as possible after enemy capture, he has directed himself to fight off the invading thoughts immediately, so as not to be taken prisoner. Think only good things.
He...
August 2011
6 posts
4 tags
1 tag
Philip Levine, poet laureate
theparisreview:
Philip Levine named America’s new poet laureate. Read his Paris Review interview here.
3 tags
Green Clapboard House
A Devil in tall black boots brushes past me at the grocery self check-out. I key the code for apples as he lingers in the baking aisle, staring as if he knows I’ve been waiting for him all my life. His ginger goatee curls towards the graveyard
across the street. His eyes say, follow me—I’ll take you into the Pennsylvania woods just beyond the headstones, lay you on a pine needle bed, and...
3 tags
Barefoot in the Graveyard
Here lieth the body of Elizabeth who departed this life July 1, 1818 in the 42nd year of her age and at her request was inter’d in the same grave with her husband.
Shoeless, the grass and slugs cold beneath our soles, we pause by the grave of a woman who wished to lie again and mingle with her lover. ...
3 tags
Physics, Baby or Sex Looks like Jimi Hendrix in a...
I never missed the bus as long as Daryl, our own Jimi Hendrix, drove. He’d beep for me, the diesel idling outside my house while I painted on my jeans and zipped my boots—always, always late.
By the time I got on the bus, Daryl had picked up David, who looked like John Lennon, and who later blasted his father away with a shotgun; Amy, my best friend, who took no shit from anyone, but disappeared...
2 tags
July 2011
16 posts
Poetry Foundation Launches Android and iPad... →
Publisher of POETRY magazine now has audio versions, links to poet bio’s, source info for each poem, and more.
3 tags
Since You Asked
Simple things like Summer trees are green Sunshine is yellow and bright Blue sky is bold and primary Children are free
Like the flowers need water The deck needs sweeping The yard needs raking The puppy needs to play Like refreshment Like endless time in a bottle of fizzy water Bubbling with coolness Like being there To observe the swarming bees To hear the symphony of birds To notice every...
3 tags
“You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as...”
– Stephen King (via writingadvice)
“By all means let the writer of short stories reduce the technical trick to its...”
– Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (via fwriction)
4 tags
Our first print-on-demand issue, shipping now
Turk’s Head Review Issue 1: Volume 1
Turk’s Head Review (turksheadreview.com) spotlights incredible new writing and artwork, the best we can find. This print-on-demand compilation of poetry, fiction, and art from the past year features work by Michael Aronovitz, Connie Beresin, Jeffrey Boyer, Andrew Wallace Chamings, Michelle Danner, J…
The literateur interviews Zadie Smith →
youmightfindyourself:
Your three novels take on quite broad themes – science and religion in White Teeth, celebrity culture in The Autograph Man, and politics in On Beauty –and your characters tend to epitomize different factions of thinking. One can list countless examples – such as the Kipps and Belsey’s opposing political ideas in On Beauty, and Magid’s scientific atheism paired with his...
“An answer that was right the first time may not be right again the second.”
– Italo Calvino (via theparisreview)
2 tags
“A good poem offers always some entrance into and reminder of the fact that...”
– Jane Hirshfield on the qualities of good contemporary poetry, from her introduction in the Spring 1998 issue of Ploughshares. (via pshares)
The first sentence of this quote is exactly why I love poetry—genuine experience is unexpected, and beautiful, and singular in its ability to hold us in a...
2 tags
April 2011
2 posts
3 tags
“Cheek to Cheek” by Irving Berlin
...
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March 2011
1 post
3 tags
January 2011
13 posts
3 tags
The Soldier
December
The first snow of the year never lasts. It usually starts with a few flakes dancing on the air like campfire ash, then graduates to a heavier pattern. I like when it slants. I like when it straightens, when it thickens, makes the world into a snow globe. I take the quilt from the bed and wrap it around myself, the pathetic old king with his robes trailing him across the floor...
Herman Melville Likes Your Beard
towirr:
Or as he calls them, in order, in two chapters of White Jacket:
beards
the crop
suburbs of the chin
homeward-bounders
fly-brushes
long, trailing moss hanging from the bough of some aged oak
love-curls
Winnebago locks
carroty bunches
rebellious bristles
redundant mops
yellow bamboos
long whiskers
thrice-noble beards
plantations of hair
whiskerandoes
nodding harvests
viny...
3 tags
This Is Running Like a Mad Groundhog
This day, this life, is suddenly running like a mad groundhog. Pastoral slowness abandoned to this mad dash to cross the killer road. Ducking under lightly guarded, soft metal barriers, Invading the concrete expanse, Exploding to the other side. This day, this life, is suddenly running With a groundhog’s mad, wild abandon. Like a pair of hairy wings with glazed eyeballs. Like a pair of muscled...
1 tag
3 tags
Amaryllis Snow
Veined orange blooms – nice against the drab winter grass. Snow brings loveliness.
- Margaret Robinson