Essay |
“’Then was the fear a little quieted’: at the reading last night”
“Ralph read some poems about bears because he saw Hayden Carruth read, & Hayden said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to write nothing at all except poems about bears?’ & so Ralph wrote ‘a garland of bears.’ & some of those poems were about Hayden …”
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“The Acid of the Bath”: on Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead and Hervé Guibert’s The Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991
“When Guibert is diagnosed with AIDS, Zambreno describes his response as ‘the calm of the hypochondriac who has been preparing for calamity his whole life,’ but one could also read it as the punishment a queer artist raised in heteronormative Catholicism had come to expect in return for venal sin.”
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on “Poems Not Written” — a recurring feature On The Seawall
“We have to be okay with letting our writing rest. My friend reminds me that if poetry makes nothing happen, as Auden said, not-writing poetry has quite the opposite effect.”
Essay |
“Robert Desnos in the Desert”
“This is impossible, but Desnos is standing on the Mexican side of the Stanton Street Bridge, facing downtown El Paso. He is waiting for me to close the distance from one side of the international border to the other.”
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“Famous Men” and “Sure Can’t”
“So I bought the earrings, which were zircon, which is real and not to be confused with zirconia. Peachy-pink, for grounding, I guess, or healing, or hope, as is usually the case and almost always needed.”
Essay |
“Æ, the Letter Ash”
“The æsc (ash) tree was felled for spear handles, tablets, charcoal, bedframes, wagon wheels, oars — perhaps this is why the author of the Old English “Rune Poem” in the eighth century observes that the æsc is precious, although many men attack it.“
Essay |
“The Sky of His Mouth”
“He became fascinated with the music and poetry of Tupac Shakur at some point in the 90s after hearing ‘Dear Mama’ on the radio. He also found it a lot easier to get his students interested in Tupac than Delmore Schwartz and Robert Lowell.”
Essay |
“Conserving Michelangelo”
“A diagonal tear crosses from the arches on the left to the robe of the figure on the right, then disappears — as if a bird had suddenly flown through Michelangelo’s studio and he, taking its path for a sign, had put it in.”
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“I Thee Wed”
“‘Who was she?’ Mom screamed over and over. I rolled out of bed and stood in the doorway just in time to see Dad slap her hard across the face. He slapped her again.”
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“Fermi’s Interaction”
“My father was working towards his Ph.D. in Chemistry, with ventures into bio-chem, and he was part of handful of students who were studying with Enrico Fermi, who had recently arrived at Columbia, a year after winning the Nobel Prize for his discovery of slow neutrons …”
Essay |
“The Folly of Existing”
“Consider the command: ‘Do as I say and you will reap the reward.’ We hear these words often; what we do not know, what Abraham himself could not know with certainty, is who speaks to us thus. Is it God or Satan?”
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on “Poems Not Written” — a recurring feature On The Seawall
“A poet’s job, if we can call it a job, is not to be a stenographer, recording in blunt shorthand terrible moments … so culpability might be determined. A poet’s job is to remind us of the networks along which feeling — traumatic and otherwise — travels and oftentimes warps: cellular, familial, temporal, sociocultural, historical.”
Essay |
“My Piano Teacher Talks to God”
“It always took me a while to readjust from my fake piano to Ms. Kim’s real and very beautiful piano each week at the start of my lessons. But once I got into it, I was pretty good.”
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“Innavigable Sea”
“A gaze that, never leering, still seems to undress me, to see something of my insides that should be left there behind my eyes.”
Essay |
“The Weather Brewer”
“The whacks, the wallops, burning the underside of an arm, the rake of one ringed hand along a ridge of boy-skin — all of these were consistent in exceeding their ostensible cause.”