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23 Articles

Eternal Recurrence I don’t knowwhat’s so neoabout neo-nazis they seem a lotlike the oldnazis to me shouting jews will not replace usin charlottesvillein frankfurt marching by my grandmother’shouse shoutingpretty much the same ought we to get going nowgalloping seemsa good idea Soft Targets It was good getting drunk in the undulant city.Whiskey lopping off the day’s fear. Dawn came with an element of Xanax.Dusk came and I dumbed myself down. Where there were brides, grooms—bored boysoldiers with iphones and guns. I’m a soft target, you’re a soft target,and the city has a hundred hundred thousand softs. The pervious skin, the softness of the face,the wrist inners, the hips, the lips, the tongue, the global body,its infinite permute softnesses. ~ Soft targets, soft readers, drinkers,pedestrians in rain— In the failing light we walked outand now we share a room with it (would you like to read to…

Stone December Except for the blue jay jabbering for sex, solitary bright note of sky. Except for the wandering chickens & the guard cats the lone trees on my side of the street still somehow ablaze with fall. Except for this whole animal world, I’ll talk to no one. No one. Last night, with him inside me I could remember why I hate it. I wanted to say, you have to make me ask for it but then it was morning & he was driving me back home. Hush. How can I say this so you’ll believe me? It’s fine. It’s all fine, perfect skein of my living, brazen misplaced song. [Black Feeling] … & after that, even the whirring of your head goes quiet. Even your breath. No sound. Someone in workshop says something like, in Italian, stanza means room. Don’t roll your eyes. Here you are in the room. Here you are…

How I feel right now? Sharp pain/How I felt yesterday? Pain not as sharp but dull just as maddening to extract/How can I tell if I can’t see the wound? I am an academic. I study race, Jim Crow got wings and pseudopods I know its flapping in my belly, I know its squirming/How do I cope? I don’t, I wait for something that looks like a tongue blooming and I water it/How do you say that another way? I look for fire in the eyes of hurt and pray it becomes a superpower/How can you control the flame? That’s the point, I am looking for a loss of control/Do you think that will numb your pain?/Do you think that will solve the problem? When has solving the problem been…

2018 DOROTHY BRUNSMAN POETRY PRIZE The poems in The Slow Art are boiled down to unflinching essentials. Golden refuses to hide behind the easy fires and maximal adornment of so much contemporary poetry, giving us a rough-edged vision that drifts out into a world of machinery, work, and family. The art here is that the poems drift inward, too—to the landscape of the self where time, language, and experience become a tangle of the brutal, the mysterious, the essential, and the celebrated…. I celebrate this book whose heart contains the world and those who work it “for her, for him, for them, for me, for you.” —Michael McGriff, author of Early Hour and Black Postcards In these poems that confront love and loss in a beautiful yet unforgiving place, the landscape is populated…

1. A poem is something that can’t otherwise be said addressed to someone who can’t otherwise hear it. By this definition, poetry is deeply impractical and deeply necessary. There aren’t good words for most things we need to express, and lots of the people we need to say them to are dead or otherwise unavailable. Poets tend to need poems to handle subjects that are complex, subtle, nuanced, even painful, embarrassing, shameful, or simply ridiculous if actually uttered aloud. And so we have always needed poetry, as long as there has been language, and perhaps even before. Language began with poetry, with the idea that this means that, a word, a sound, can conjure a thing, with the fact that we often need our mouths to point to what’s beyond the…

Wartime Lullaby This is your early childhood.Your brother scratched your face here.This broken-concrete patio.Daffodils under your window will come and go like friends. She enters the combination 0000opens a suitcase full of official documents,deposits a fresh jasmine, a pencil and lighter, a thin gold chainand a lotus bud pendant,things to make me powerful. One more thing: She calls me a word that sounds like a frogor a crispy snack. A good crushed word. Your dad didn’t come to the hospital the day you were born. That is your early childhood. Poem About My Feelings I want a salary for my feelings You heard meI want to get paid I want a raiseevery time I must explain Because if I get paidfor the ways I feel(and I feel so much)maybe I would be more worthy of respect Maybe one dayI’ll make feeling my…

A Space to Train and Exit Maybe California’s just plain easier,with the commonnessof outbuildings. Raw-looking cedar or sheetmetal walls and a runnelof sun getting in through the roof seams.Position the heavy bag, tighten the eyebolt,twenty-five right hooks. Or pull upa chair and compose your suicide note.A space to train and exit. I live in Boston. No separate shedout back but stillthe tenant who had my apartment before memanaged to kill herself.What the landlord has mentioned a numberof times is that she was finallycheery on the one day before she died,because she’d decided. Why does hetell me that? I picture her here,watering ferns or else maybe discardingunwatered ferns, serene in her certainty. The purpose of having a body at allis to practice, to practicethe keeping alive of domesticanimals and plants. You dispense to yourselfsome…

The Optometrist He stands at his window Removes his glasses Squints in the direction Of Urgent Care, there Emblazoned in a red Neon perplex. He keeps A handout concerning Joyce’s Vision trials in a drawer Beneath the tonometer. He printed the copies Because zeal without Prudence is a ship Adrift. A man walks In so he asks the man To look in the viewer. He says, Now please read the first line. Good. The second line. Now Read the line in red. The Sick Woman Moves elements around On the spreadsheet. She Eats a single dry cheerio. In column F of Row 67, She writes narwhal, lets The word linger there Amidst all the business, And deletes it, slowly. The Professor Reconsiders her investment Strategy on her laptop In bed while the full moon Douses the planet. She thinks of the curve Of the shore from space, Looks to the lights Of the distant strip, Her penlight on rock pools, On anemones, on prawn. Earthen Lives, she says out loud, Startling…

VISITING WRITERS SERIES

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS CARMEN MARIA MACHADO Thursday, September 27, 2018, 7 PM, Connelly Auditorium Terra Hall, 211 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, Tin House, VQR, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. She is the…

VISITING WRITERS SERIES

FOR ASTRONAUTS WHO MENSTRUATE

Men worried microgravity might cause the blood to flow upinto the Fallopian tubes, through the abdomen, blood swallowingthe uterus: retrograde menstruation. When I was 8, Christa McAuliffe died in my classroomsilently on the screen, then televisions wheeled away. I didn’t knoweverything that blood could mean. Two years before, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.They packed her a make-up kit, tampons she’d need for a week’s mission,the engineers thought maybe 100 would be enough. Scientists have not studied the long-term effects of periods in space. They don’t know how deep-space radiation affects hormones: astronauts who menstruate should use IUDs or stop biology. Shannon Lucid couldn’t stay away from space, went out a secondand third and fourth and fifth flight. She took a ride to the space station Mirstayed out past curfew, uterine tissue growing…

IN WHICH A THERAPIST ASKS FOR THE GARGOYLE WHO SITS ON MY CHEST

Better say first,the gargoyle requested, I doubt he’ll appear. A fragrant character at most,he’s so metal, and hard to woo, and God knows I’m terribleat therapy— the pushy box of tissues, and kindly on-the-clockneutrality. It’s exhausting, how the whole’s designed to scrubour greasy pan of sorrows toa gleam in which we’ve actually paid to see ourselves. Caveat emptor? O, verily.To talk and talk like this is whatthe age calls progress— that peculiar human rage for movingforward, like tourists walking offof cliffs while taking selfies. But since I’ve come to talk, and urged to use my similes:it’s apt to say I feelmost like a Fenian Incursion— the third botched skirmish,specifically. God bless the Irish, (those poets), for thinking theycould hotwire Canada, then sell itto the British. Though, this makes perfect sense to me, another unsurprisingoutcome of an ill considered plot, conjured awkward in a haystacknear a town…

THE SPACE BETWEEN

White space within a poem engages the reader on a visual level and evokes an aesthetic impression before the words are read. According to the typographer Jan Tschichold, “White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background. It is the canvas and blank page, but it is also the silence.” In a holographic sense, no space exists between elements; the apparent void is always full. White space, or negative space, is geography, through boundary and organization, and allows the white to flood and create a moat, providing the reader with a visual demarcation and shape to the words themselves. White space can represent a blank to fill, no longer passive, but active and wanting. The reader participates in the experience, as always, but in this…

THE SPACE BETWEEN

Who Can Say What Happens Inside Each Bright Life? Aloof, the gods broke open atoms like hazelnuts above us. Imagine first a tight-rope between the stars, then—poof—gone. Blue day, willows rasping with wind, our pliable lives, pried ajar. The greater pains we categorized as prime numbers: 3, 7, 13, irresolvable into smaller units. Reader, I am trying to summon the nerve to tell you what I learned: I can come inside my lover and make nothing. I’m a body on the edge of a black hole, thin as spaghetti. And everything I broke I broke alone. Sentience as an Outing to the Zoo Children throw pebblesat the jeweled headof the peacock and bark backat the seals. Who can say what happensinside each bright life? Scientists study the brain’sancient core in insects:no, not dark inside, not simplereflex—it feels like something to be a bee. Livid with loss,a hive rears a new…

Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves. —Owen Barfield Young people together—there never was An image more pressing. In the ebon lapse Of time, our slow damnation to continuities, A pigeon loves hopelessly the cold, clay owl Meant only to frighten her. Likewise, Young people pause in a doorway fifty And more years ago. I am one of them. I am also here to one side, desperate To image their youth-time to myself Just once: clay to clay, owl to stone cold owl. One of them smiles to herself beneath her hair. The doorway seems to part two fires. Another slips her hand into a boy’s back pocket, Feather-light, and all of them laugh together. The fires join. The doorway disappears. For yet his noule was totty of the must, And truly our youth-time was autumn In the world—golden…

In the Valley What was teaching in that first Pennsylvania winter but listening to directions and learning how to drive on icy two-lane roads from Easton to Bethlehem? You were tested by a deer standing starkly on the yellow line and a dead opossum freezing in the gravel and the radio playing spirituals about going home on a lonesome highway. The sun skidded to a halt in the smokestacks over the river and I can still see you climbing the snowy hills and coasting past the empty factories and abandoned warehouses to a Catholic school on the edge of town. You were a skeptic in the Valley of the Lord who carried “Pied Beauty” in your jacket pocket and drank scalding coffee in the Teacher’s Lounge with two old priests and a lanky young nun who played pick-up basketball and noticed all things counter, original, spare, strange. What was teaching but quieting a classroom and learning how to stand at a blackboard with an open book and praise the unfathomable mystery of being to…

Like One Who Has Mingled Freely with the World I cannot fly. I jump and jump to imitate a bird. Surrounded by children, I leap up with a huge silk scarf around my shoulders to look like a crane. They laugh and laugh and push me into a rabbit skin and watch. At night I glint with long ears and peep through a window misted with the steam from a tea kettle, hoping that they’ll let me in. I’m mostly alone. They want to keep me as a legend: invisible, silly, a hopeless woman-chaser. That’s what I was to the girl in a wedding kimono. She screamed when I popped up from the rice paddy like a big frog, sniffed her musk, aroused, and got very tired. There’s no harm in me except some occasional cuts. They’re meant to remind you of life. Dirty, honest, lonely—if…

BOWL OF ORANGES

I first read Jos Charles’s feeld as a Word document two years ago. I admired her first book, Safe Space, and wanted to know what she was working on next. When I started to read the poems in the new manuscript, I felt like the words were physically lifting up off my laptop screen toward my eyeballs. It was that rarest thing—a totally new sound, riffing on Donne and Chaucer, yes (Celan and Lispector also loom large), but still totally new, an unprecedented syntax to accommodate an unprecedented experience. Every poet gropes their way towards this kind of sui generis utterance, but so few of us achieve it so absolutely. “i am speeching / materialie,” she writes. I recently chatted with Jos about the book (and about unwieldiness, and oranges,…

HYSTERICAL WATER

I. To Cause Conception, take the whites of 16 eggs beat well and put them into the milk. Stir them well together into an ordinary silk with a soft firmness. II. She felt the whole thing, she felt everything— They told me about my mother, who survived the C-section she interrupted with STOP!, because the person whose one job it was to numb her belly from knowing it was being seared apart had failed her. My baby brother went straight to the incubator, swollen, swimming in three times the pool of amniotic fluid. I visited him like he was a strange sea creature at the aquarium, wanted to reach my hands into the box but he was covered in wires. Five months, the baby and I slept in my grandmother’s basement. I was eight, and my mother, they said she was sick. I used to wonder…

I Never Used to Write About Birds falling out of the skyI must have had freedomand lost it in my rushto pick through the ambrosiabone and crust the divinethrow down to uswhen the sun betrays their secretluminous banquet waves rush to fillthe wet compromisebetween hell and heavenevery nerve I ownis swelling to golden hour’shaze and plummet litany this is the closestI’ll get to grabbingour unjust godby the pearlsstrung across his throatso I can askwhy he sat back in lusterall these millenniawatching my people die the birds never risewhen gold dust collectsin their feather threadsagainst the cusp of duskdesign forsakenthe birds fall from flightand punctuate the surfaceof Lake Michigan it’s time to glowup in praise of the starsburning gainlessand the sun tracing cloudsin renaissance oil paintpraise where the sky cracksopen to its interiorthe backlit ozone They Want…

This This Is the End And when and when my snaggletooth wife Backs out of the driveway beside a grinning fool I think this this is the end I drive all night I run over a cat Her kitten clawing scrabbling blind in the dirt I scoop her up she purrs In the hook of my arm for a year And when and when My mother my impossibly kind mother Holds an X-ray of her skull Her finger upon a crabapple lump And she no longer talks and she hums That is no song I say and her eyes are stones I think this this must be the end I speak to the ocean at dusk I say dear ocean am I not the worst thing The spinning world has ever made The waves drink my hair The waves urge me like a leaf to my bed And when and…

Diner At twenty past the hour,there is a scent of bacon and wind.Drying flowers on the cigarette machinecrackle in unseen flames. The spirit steps out of the quietfor air and returns to the waterfallof silverware and cups and talk.We don’t have honey wheat, wehave wheat, ryeand white,says the waitress, I was callingyou honey, honey. Political Landscape You see, the night lovesthe pond with the muckof dusk along the shore. How else could it be?The owls and loonsare ghosts in the mistand fall over whenthey are covered thoroughly. You can’t just talk about artand sip coffee and sayit is too hot.You can’t say the king is deadand pretend it is not a wayto keep from being intimate. You can’t just saythe soul is an emptygrand lobby and windgoes through it likea train whistle and smoke.You can’t just bring mean apron…

THE WILDS OF POETRY

Ecopoetry not in the sense of poetry decorated somehow with landscape—bird or snake, river or mountain—but in the radical sense of poetry that weaves consciousness and landscape together, returning the human to “nature” and the “wild,” from which we are excluded by cultural definition and assumption. And so, a poetry capable of transforming how one experiences oneself in the world on a day-to-day basis. This could be a definition of classical Chinese poetry; and remarkably, it is no less a definition for the poetic project of the twentieth-century American avant-garde. The connection is not gratuitous: classical Chinese poetry embodies the philosophical insights of Taoism and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism, and those same insights also drive the conceptual revolution of our avant-garde tradition. Even if they are 2500 years old, those insights…

DEVOTION (REFLECTION)

when contemplating the word devotionand its scalloped edges, the seaside-at-sunset-pinkit often wears to provoke those who would walk alongside it,I always imagined myself in the approach,one of those starched-collar suitors armed with stiff bouquets of formal roses,knee desperate to bend, litany of my faultsloaded on the tongue already, the elegant catapult of my mouthhungry to launch the volleyof unworthiness, which happens to be the name of my favorite chapel in the church of language,where I try to worship frequently,though sometimes my fervor lapses into a practice based on utility,i.e. I only come around when I need something,which makes me feel guilty, sure, and therefore unworthy, so I guessit all works out, in a way, it’s restrictivebut comfortable, at least and when I think of devotion I always seemyself in the suit, whispering intenselyinto the ear of the…

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