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“City Where the Pennies Look Out for You”
“… my wife walked past Chase Bank and the man, somehow still standing there, asked, ‘Can I have a dollar? You promised that you’d give me a dollar tonight and right now is tonight.'”
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on “Poems Not Written” / a recurring feature On The Seawall
“I read the lines to my father on his last day. Then I stopped working on it and for forty years it stayed in the folder that could have been labelled ‘orphan inspirations’ …”
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“Travel from Pittsburgh [again] / Writing the Versions: A Recurrence of Variation”
“All night the driver continued through the unknown knowing then it was there — when the weight of migration pushed the people onward in the remains of what was left. And the car kept following the tunnel of its headlights in the recurrence of a winter storm.”
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on Poems Not Written / a recurring feature On The Seawall
“I don’t feel that we get to choose the emphasis of the book that we are writing. But we can choose the thematic thrust when it begins to shape itself.”
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on Poems Not Written / a recurring feature On The Seawall
“… the poems I have not written come from a deep fatigue or suspicion in the poetic endeavor, and the poetic, speaking body as reduced or annihilated to dust or ash …”
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“December”
“Books don’t prepare you for what’s coming. Manuals for pregnant women must have been written by mothers completely drugged by love for their children, without the slightest pinch of critical distance.”
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“With This Needle I Thee Mend: The Oldest Tool Still Used”
“Hanging by a thread, we have kept our secret weapons, our needles, and brought them along for millennia.”
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“Friendship on the Page”
“… the continuous intertwined narrative of a reciprocal exchange between just two correspondents … I found exactly that in the correspondence between William Maxwell and Eudora Welty.”
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“The Depths”
“Two years have passed since my electroconvulsive treatments. No longer eating or sleeping, I had slipped under the ward doors as a ghost.”
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“On Glamor”
“‘Glamor’ means magic, derived from ‘grammar’ (fr.); since in the Middle Ages scholars, i.e. grammarians, were ‘viewed with awe’ by the vulgar (who couldn’t speak Latin).”
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“Diversity: A Garden Allegory”
“The covenant for our homeowners association specifies that what I’ve done around my house is technically prohibited. There should be fewer wildflowers in my yard. Banish the milkweed.”
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“Metaphor As Illness”
“Illness is obscene in its reality. No wonder we hurry to clothe it in metaphor, to drape it in wooly lengths of symbolism.”
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“March 23, 2020,” “Minecraft Ars Poetica,” “For The Record” & “The Doll”
“My son comes in to tell me he didn’t mean to kill another sheep in his game. Yes, he dropped it from a great height, but he didn’t know it would die. He can tell it died by the floating block of wool left behind.”
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Life’s Work: on the Poetry of Jane Mead
“Jane Mead brought her five books of poetry and 14 new poems into To the Wren: Collected & New Poems, 1991-2019. She died less than a month after its publication.”
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“Making Wondrous” and “Now This Light”
“… the newborn foals leaping for the first time into the tree-line, that bandwidth of blood-red marking the whole world with her precious hooves like notes of earth music and Nureyev song soaring in the saplings of her legs …”