founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

April 2014

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE

volume cciv • number 1

CONTENTS

April 2014

P O E M S

sarah lindsay 3 Rain of Statues Attack Underground

ishion hutchinson 6 A March Homage: Vallejo “At nights birds hammered my unborn” “A furnace in my father’s voice; I prayed for the coal stove’s”

valzhyna mort 10 The Judgment Tale

liane strauss 12 My Meninas and the Moon

gina franco 14 Refrain

gabrielle calvocoressi 16 Captain Lovell ... Captain Lovell ... Captain Lovell ...

dorothea lasky 20 Lilac Field The End

dolores hayden 23 Flying Lesson Exuberance

matthew sweeney 26 Gold The Igloo

sheryl luna 28 Shock and Awe Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps

kim addonizio 30 Lives of the Poets

samiya bashir 31 Carnot Cycle Consequences of the Laws of Thermodynamics

matthew zapruder 34 American Singer Poem for Bill Cassidy

mark bibbins 42 Factory

karen an-hwei lee 44 On Hierophany

michael earl craig 45 Night Nurse Advice for Horsemen In a Grove

najwan darwish 48 Mary Want Ad A Moment of Silence Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

charles bernstein 51 Me and My Pharaoh ...

c O M M E N T

michael klein 63 Risk Delight: Happiness and the “I” at the End of the World

rebecca hazelton 72 Three Reviews

christina pugh 82 The Emily Dickinsons

contributors 86

Editor

Art Director

Managing Editor

Assistant Editor

Editorial Assistant

Consulting Editor

Design

don share

fred sasaki

valerie jean johnson

lindsay garbutt

holly amos

christina pugh

alexander knowlton

cover art by lilli carré“Freckled,” 2014

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Poetry • April 2014 • Volume 204 • Number 1

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POEMS

3SARAH lINDSAY

sarah lindsay

Rain of Statues

From the Mithridatic Wars, first century BC

Our general was elsewhere, but we drowned.While he rested, he shipped us homewith the bulk of his spoilsthat had weighed his army down.The thrashing stormthat caught us cracked the hullsand made us offerings to the sea floor — a rain of statues, gold, and men.

Released from service,done with war,the crash and hiss muted,we fell through streams of creatureswhose lives were their purpose.We settled with treasure lootedfrom temples of rubbled Athenian Greece;among us, bronze and marble gods and goddessesmoored without grace,dodged by incurious fish.Their power was never meant to buoy us — our pleasures were incidental gifts — but, shaken by their radiance in our dust,we had given them our voices.

Their faces, wings, and limbslie here with our sanded bonesand motionless devices. Little crabs attempt to don ringsset with agate and amethyst,and many an octopus,seeking an hour of rest,finds shelter in our brain-cases.So we are still of use.

4 POETRY

Attack Underground

Themiscyra, 72 BC

While Lucullus raided cherry orchards,he left us to besiege, grudgingly, this outlander fortress,named for an Amazon queen,while thinking of food and home.Not one of us has seena single horse-borne warrior woman.Meanwhile, we dug a tomb.

We intended it as the tunnelthrough which we’d claim the fort.We shored up the sifting roofand dug by lamps that shed more shadows than light.At last we formed up undergroundto attack with sword and fire,but the enemy tossed in hives,

and in a cloud of stinging beesour torches jerked and swung or fellso we could hardly tellwhere to strike, or what, for nextour enemy sent weasels in, and foxes,which seemed to be done in jestuntil we felt their teethand heard, more than saw, the larger beasts.

A wolf began my death.I lay in men’s and weasels’ bloodand heard the bodythat dropped at my sideask, What barbarian thought to makeof thoughtless creatures weapons of war?

5SARAH lINDSAY

But a flung torch showed me the faceof a bear that said nothing, and died.Then came the boar.

6 POETRY

ishion hutchinson

A March

Lesson of the day: Syria and Styria.For Syria, read: His conquering banner shook from Syria.And for Styria: Look at this harp of blood, mapping.

Now I am tuned. I am going to go abovemy voice for the sake of the forest shakenon the bitumen. You can see stars in the skulls,

winking, synapses, intermittent, on edgeof shriek — perhaps a cluster of fir, birches? — Anyways. Don’t get too hung up

on the terms; they have entropyin common, bad for the public weal,those obtuse centurions in the flare

of the bougainvillea, their patent-seekinggift kindled. Divers speech. Cruelty.Justice. Never mind, but do

pay attention to the skirmish — the whitepanther that flitters up the pole — its shade grows large on the ground.

7ISHION HUTcHINSON

Homage: Vallejo

Brailed up from birth, these obdurate, obituary cornersof second life the hospital light ravened solstice

blessed with a caesarean and now we have a republic,the bread under arm, water-bearer of the sea: Cetus, Christ.

After the blackbird I put on my herringbone jacket,the feather hummed gargoyles bearing down buildings,

rain scowled down, Vallejo and Vallejo as I hurriedup Eager Street; Thursday, I remember the white stone

in the flask and wild asterisks hissing; Thursdays, fallingat noon, at Cathedral Street, blackbirds falling quietly at Biddle Street.

8 POETRY

“At nights birds hammered my unborn”

At nights birds hammered my unbornchild’s heart to strength, each strike bringing

bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestledloud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone

among women who cursed their heartsout, soured themselves, never-brides,

into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistenedtheir quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy.

Anvil-black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurled

from Colchis and I rejoiced like a broken

asylum to see burning sand grains, skittering ice;shekels clapped in my chest, I smashed my head against a lightbulb

and light sprinkled my hair; I rejoiced, a pouitree hit by the sun in the room, a man, a man.

9ISHION HUTcHINSON

“A furnace in my father’s voice; I prayed for the coal stove’s”

A furnace in my father’s voice; I prayed for the coal stove’sroses, a cruise ship lit like a castle

on fire in the harbor we never walked,father and son, father drifting down

the ferned hell his shanty shone, where,inside, in my head, the lamp was the lamp.

The market, the park, the library not a soulbut grandmother’s morning wash lifting toward heaven,

the barrister sun punished my sister, I stared at my handin a book, the horizon declined in my mouth.

My little earthshaker, visored in placenta,wonder of wonders, tremulous in amniotic

shield, ensouled already, father in the veritablenight, without house or harbor,

soon sea in a voice will harrowa scorpion’s blaze in me, to the marrow.

10 POETRY

valzhyna mort

The Judgment Tale

Over the growing shadows fell the dead weight of light.

With a long bark mules metered the distance and turned back.Dust rose like columns of unpaid debt.Spit dried before it could reach the ground.

Then the thin-barked orange trees disowned their thick-skinned fruit.Then mosquitoes spat out bad blood into the gutters and were gone.

Fish was opened like a two-page book,its skeleton, caught aflame like an asp,inscribed with fire along the bone lines,then slapped on a stone face of a plate next to a Coca-Cola bottle as cold as hell.

In the market fruit prices jumped up so high — the seller women turned into hawks.

With a gibbous peacock brushing by their feet,in the woods where each leaf hides a face, and each trunk a spine, and each tree a crime, where owls and angels,

a man and three women were contesting an apple.

The winner’s body itself was an apple with skin chewed off.Inside her breasts milk circled like a growling animallocked behind two heavy nipples.

It was both day and night.Her moon-white hand on the sun-gold fruit.In her hair more stones than in a graveyard.

1 1vAlZHYNA MORT

So

I followed the woman as she atehoping if not for a bitethen at leasta spit in my direction.But she left nothing of that apple.Not even the memory of eating it

ever.

12 POETRY

liane strauss

My Meninas and the Moon

I would try to do it in my way, forgetting Velázquez.... So, little by little, I would paint my Meninas ... they would be “my” Meninas.

— Pablo Picasso

My meninas are as changeable as the moon.Black and white and in color.Happy, sad, and how many words there arefor red enough and the pallor of skin.

Their moments of verisimilitude do not outweightheir flashes of pathos. Whole days go bywhen they cannot appreciate the humorof which the dog is one manner, the dwarf another.

My meninas are not puppets, but puppet theaters.That it is the puppet master who draws the curtainin the stairwell is pure whimsy on my part.A minuet of despair, andante of foolhardiness.

How many times have I tried to explain these differences,the sting of joy, a lilt of crimson,the dark and the light of the moon not the moon,the soul but a sphere predisposed to rotation?

The man in the doorway. The dog who lies sleeping.These are my meninas. The sun in the mirror.The sun and the moon and the man behind the easel,mostly invisible, like the pictures on the wall.

The moon is not more changeable, however,than they, my meninas, who never stop changingand waiting on the children of the sunand of the moon, for they will always be

13lIANE STRAUSS

my meninas, their eyes of every minim on the palette,blue and tragical, white on white againsta black ground, until the moon sings every shapeand shade of gray from hope to ample. And again.

14 POETRY

gina franco

Refrain

It would never be possible for a stone, no more than for an airplane, to elevate itself toward the sun in jubilation.

— Martin Heidegger

The dragonflies again; the last time seeing them skim the river close to forgotten — their singing, their shimmer — now remembered, becoming so much flame; as tongues over the heads of the chosen in the child’s picture book of Christ I learned by heart, descent and weight of after the fact, the gift the fork between hope and vanity, the river that eatsitself turned mirror broken into light; the corpse between the beloved’s good word and the beloved who having spoken was ever spokeninto being, lies, unspeaking, and as with any heaviness that lowersthen hovers, remains inconceivable; so the letter given in stone, perfection in fire;love; all love’s failures; the winged animaldrops to the earth and is there buried in a hole where it digs in the grit like the blade we left in the riverbed, adrift and cry-shaped in the memory, both that dim and that loud; though no accosting why itseems that way, everything ghost of itself or everything made of mythic proportion, the walkersinking from the face of the waters, the dragon I

15GINA FRANcO

become when I talk to myself, what a belief is, terrifyingand relentless; I’ve never been able to tell the difference; the brute and the apparitionin reflection speak at once — the rock and the rock’s light — so that now the insect thrums and it is surelya kind of tenderness, an ODing in secret, turning into while turningfrom the soul the animal raised and devoured in dream; imagine, the child’s wished-for surface gives and ripples up to mouththe perfect imprint, saying “aircraft” and there are aircraft, amen,the walker is surrounded by flight on all sides; the walker walks without wings; see,

the recollection is flawless, turning wings of jewels; the recollection is absolute, swallows whole;

echoes;

and the dragon feasts; and the dragon flies again;

16 POETRY

gabrielle calvocoressi

Captain Lovell,

Dad calls her the Dowager but I call her Aunt G.Aunt G. at the Polo Lounge. Aunt G. drinking gimletsby the pool. Aunt G. asking about Babe eventhough she’s the only one who sees her that muchanymore. She wears ten rings. Seven on herright hand, which Dad calls the Seven Stars.They make the glass seem like it’s going to crack.

She doesn’t like me very much. I know it.I’m not her kind of girl. I won’t wear dressesand when she placed the ring inside my handI just said, “No, thank you.” Not even thinkinghow rude that might sound. What would I dowith a ring like that? I’ve got my own starsand she doesn’t really want to give

me presents anyway. She gave Babe a car,her dark brown Aston Martin. And she gaveDavid a watch to “remember home by.”She gave my Dad a look when he said, “David’sa good soldier.” Like he gave her something badto eat. She just shook her head and said,

“I’ll never understand what kind of man you are.”

And then she said Dad would have that young boy’sblood on his hands. Which I don’t understand.Or why she said, “You’ve gone and lost the bothof them. You’re your very own Pol Pot,” while lookingthrough her purse. It shone so bright it blindedme. For a second I saw spots and couldn’t focuson the thing. One clear stone that caught the light

and made reflections on my glasses. I didn’t wantit. I don’t wear things like that. “Who are you?”she asked, not in a mean way but like she truly

17GABRIEllE cAlvOcORESSI

didn’t know. And didn’t really care. She took it backand asked me if I’d talked to Babe and I saidI had not and no one else had either.I said, “She’s living in the hills.”

And she looked at the ring for a minuteand put it back in her purse.

18 POETRY

Captain Lovell,

My eyes are shaky and glimmer like the stars.My head turns to the left and it movesjust like a pendulum. The kids laugh and shakeit back to me, all the ways I’m stupid,not like them. But I know how the grass soundswhen the locusts come, like a spaceshiptaking off and how it makes the air shake.

Captain Lovell, I heard it in the branchesand the leaves. I heard the rocket leaving.My teacher said it wasn’t so, that you’repast hearing but my father said I could.He puts his hands hard on my shouldersfrom behind and holds my head stillwith his looking. But I can feel how much

I want to shake and let myself go looseand double like a cloud of mayflies on the lake,you know just how they rise so you couldn’tsee just one of them, not even with your thumbheld up to catch one with your eyes. It’s somethingI can’t do that Babe and David can, can’t sightthe stars or use a telescope or ever fire a gun.

Dr. Lovell, I like to think you’re spinningand can’t feel it like I can’t feel the world shakeunless I’m really tired and then it’s like a giftto let it go and just stop trying so hard. I liketo think you let go too and when the kidsrun at me and move their heads from leftto right and call me “Zigzag” I look up

and wish myself up there with youjust calm and swinging through the stars.

19GABRIEllE cAlvOcORESSI

Captain Lovell,

Shakey Eyes Horton had nystagmus too.That’s what my father said and took meto the record store so we could buy himand take him home to listen. Babe sayshe’s so square but we go all over. We listento music for hours and dance aroundthe house like crazy skeletons: loose

with all our bones knocking, we go,“click click click” and wave our armsand shake until we rattle all the chinain mom’s cabinet. He turns the volumeup and we spin like planets round the sun.Babe says he’s no fun but I know differentbecause I see him laughing and I try,

which she just never does. She walksinto the house with Jasper waiting in the car.She grabs some clothes or asks for money,though she doesn’t even come to do thatanymore. They don’t even talk. Last timewe had the music on loud and we were dancing.I was letting my head swing back and forth

and she just stood and watched us with the strangestlook and I said, “I’m Shakey Eyes! Come dance,”and moved my arms around. I followed her upthe stairs, swinging like a satellite and going,

“Ooh ooh ooooohhhhh,” just like a low-down good-for-nothing so and so. I know she thinks I’m funnybut she didn’t laugh and I said, “Come dance!

You know you’ve got the blues.” Then I said, “You’reno fun.” She said, “You don’t know him like I do.”

20 POETRY

dorothea lasky

Lilac Field

To perform death is something only humans would doNo animal would sit thereWith a blank look on its faceJust because the camera is there

No no an animal would look directly in itOr cover its face, like the overweightWoman in the picture in the magazineBy the room where I keep my bed

What people don’t understand about beautyIs that after all it is not fleetingAfter all it is so gross to be that wayThat someone sees among you

After all, to call into questionI painted my lips, my eyesOnly our scholars know thatTo perform is to be malleable

To perform in languageOr was itThe large purple insect I let in the roomOr was it the furred face — the hippo or the gorge

That I was the devil in the woodIn my own bones that I knew the faceThat I took that faceWas it midnight blue sky

No, were my wings iridescentEven in these linesThe voice moves youWhat sense of exquisite cause

21DOROTHEA lASkY

Thought Moves you past these linesInto conversation With the undead

I don’t knowThat is somethingYou will have to answer for yourselfI came back to this place to help you

And that I didShoot sparks of green and grayThrough timeWhat skin sack

I put myself inI mean for what, why,Or whoDid I manage to do this for if not you

Lilaced thingThe soft rustle of beetle wingsIn air that is warm and grayAnd is not strong

But there, is there to carry us past it

22 POETRY

The End

Promising myself I would not do this againIs what kept me going

A friend told me toAnd I listened

Taking a thing to the end of its lifeIs what I was made to do

I think I am not attunedTo the things that breathe

Well that’s not trueI am in tune to breath and life

And little falls of flowers

When the moon was highI went out to the stream

And brought in the waterFor my folks, my kin, my brethren

I brought in the greenish milkTo feed the ones who were already dying

Oh did they goOh I do not know

23DOlORES HAYDEN

dolores hayden

Flying Lesson

Focus on the shapes. Cirrus, a curl,stratus, a layer, cumulus, a heap.

Humilis, a small cloud,cumulus humilis, a fine day to fly.

Incus, the anvil, stay grounded.Nimbus, rain, be careful,

don’t take off near nimbostratus,a shapeless layer

of rain, hail, ice, or snow.Ice weighs on the blades of your propeller,

weighs on the entering edge of your wings.Read a cloud,

decode it,a dense, chilly mass

can shift, flood with light.Watch for clouds closing under you,

the sky opens in a breath,shuts in a heartbeat.

24 POETRY

Exuberance

Exuberance sips bootleg gin from a garter flaskwith a ruby monogram “E.”

She wears a red dress one size too small,eyes wide, she flirts with everyone, dares

Lincoln Beachey to fly until he runs out of gas,rides a dead engine all the way down.

She watches Ormer Locklear climbout of the cockpit two hundred feet up,

tap dance on his upper wingas the houses of honest families

with their square-fenced yardsslide below his shuffle. An oval pond

winks in the sun, like a zero.Exuberance challenges pilots

to master the Falling Leaf, perfect the Tailspin,ignore the Graveyard Spiral, the Doom Loop.

These aviators predict every American will fly.Exuberance believes Everybody Ought

to Be Rich, John J. Raskob explains whyin the Ladies Home Journal. She gets stock tips

from her manicurist, call loans from her broker,buys Radio, Seaboard Utilities, Sears,

orders shares in investment trusts — why not? — chain stores keep multiplying, cars, trucks,

25DOlORES HAYDEN

planes, houses. This nation is all about growth,growth and leverage, look at the skyscrapers shooting up,

men rivet steel, floor after floor, high-speed elevatorsspring through the cores, planes soar over them all.

Sherman Fairchild has made a millionselling aerial photographs of real estate.

Exuberance travels constantly, owns landin Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Palm Beach,

she trades “binders” on lots five times over,befriends Mr. Charles Ponzi from Boston

who is raking in a bundle near Jacksonville.Prices for sand and palms are sure to rise.

But how do we know when irrational exuberancehas unduly escalated asset values?

Wall Street has been wing walking,call it barnstormer capitalism,

soon the bankers and the brokers will stealthe aviators’ lexicon, claim their own tail risks,

graveyard spirals, doomsday cycles,wonder how everything blue-sky stayed up so long.

Exuberance buys more stock on margin,volume runs high, the ticker tape

can’t keep up, higher, higher, higher,Black Thursday, not a parachute in sight.

26 POETRY

matthew sweeney

Gold

After the murder, I called a meetingto see if we were happy. I declaredI was not — I said I liked the manwe shot. You all disagreed with this.I asked if you knew him, his wife,none of you did. “Kill me, then,”I said. You all stared at me. “Why,Bernard? Of course we won’t.”

“Why not?” I said. “He was a goodman, a better man than me. Andlook at what I’ve brought you — rubbish, dodgy tales, dross.”

“Easy to dismiss that,” you said.“We appreciated it all. And youwandered the wild paths to bringit back to us — your songs, yourlegends, magic stories, your gold.”I thanked you, but shook my head.The good man was dead. I didn’t carewhat I’d brought you. I needed to go.I packed up my sagas, my song lyrics,my alchemy potions, my gold, andI disappeared.

27MATTHEw SwEENEY

The Igloo

Outside the igloo he waitedfor an invitation to come inside.There was no knocker, no doorbell.He coughed, there was no reply.

He crouched down and peered in.He felt the warm air from a firepat his cheeks and ruffle his hair.Hello he said quietly and repeated it.

The frost in his toes urged him in,so did the pain in his gut. His kneesone by one welcomed the snow and brought him into the warmth.

He stood up and breathed deeply.He held a foot up to the flamesthen swapped it for the other foot.He lay down on the polar bear rug

but a smell yanked him upright againand led him to a dresser of bonewhere a bowl sat with a cover on it.He lifted this to reveal dried meat.

He grabbed a chunk and tore at itwith his teeth. It was reindeer.He devoured all that was in the bowland went looking for some more.

He found none, but there was a bottleof firewater which he swigged.He swigged again and left it down.He lay on the bearskin and fell asleep.

28 POETRY

sheryl luna

Shock and Awe

Tightened jaw, I did not love.Flashback of myself jerked about,legs high above my head, menlaughing, I came to sea drifts,movement and crashing. I found I amnot so far from God exploding.Gifting, a friend once said, is why we live.Seven storks still and white on a gold lake.My lazy eye glances back to that originalsplit, myself high above myself.Whiplashed into forgetting, I didn’t knowhours from minutes. I was hypervigilant forcatastrophes. My head raging then numb.The early garden bare, and now,shocked with sudden memory,I return to changing sky hues,blooms of lilac bursting along sidewalks.Lazy in the grass, I free myself of guilt,imagine musicians in the park, us overcomingourselves. My eyes open before stars.Holy these leaves, these skies.What is torn opens for the light.

29SHERYl lUNA

Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps

Words fall out of my coat pocket,soak in bleach water. I touch everyone’sdirty dollars. Maslow’s got everything on me.Fourteen hours on my feet. No breaks.No smokes or lunch. Blank-eyed movements:trash bags, coffee burner, fingers numb.I am hourly protestations and false smiles.The clock clicks its slow slowing.Faces blur in a stream of hurried soccer games,sunlight, and church certainty. I have nopoem to carry, no material illusions.Cola spilled on hands, so sticky fingered,I’m far from poems. I’d write of politicians,refineries, and a border’s barbed wire,but I am unlearning America’s languageswith a mop. In a summer-hot redpolyester top, I sell lotto tickets. Cars wait for gasbillowing black. Killing time has new meaning.A jackhammer breaks apart a life. The slow globespirals, and at night black space has me dizzy.Visionaries off their meds and wacked outmeth heads sing to me. A panicky fear of robberyand humiliation drips with my sweat.Words some say are weeping twilight and sunrise.I am drawn to dramas, the couple arguing, the manheadbutting his wife in the parking lot.911: no metered aubade, and nobody butmyself to blame.

30 POETRY

kim addonizio

Lives of the Poets

One stood among the violetslistening to a bird. One went to the toiletand was struck by the moon. One felt hopelessuntil a trumpet crash, and then lo,he became a diamond. I have a shovel.Can I turn it into a poem? On my stoveI’m boiling some milk thistle.I hope it will turn into a winged thesis before you stop reading. Look, I’m topless!Listen: approaching hooves!One drowned in a swimming pool.One removed his shoesand yearned off a bridge. One liveswith Alzheimer’s in a state facility, spittlein his white beard. Itturns out words are no help.But here I am with my shoveldigging like a foolbeside the spilth and sploshof the ungirdled sea. I can’t stop.The horses are coming, the thieves.I still haven’t found lasting love.I still want to hear violsin the little beach hotelthat’s torn down and gone.I want to see again the fishschooling and glittering like a veilwhere the waves shoveagainst the breakwater. Goneis the girl in her white sliptesting the chill with one bare foot.It’s too cold, but she goes in, socarefully, oh.

31SAMIYA BASHIR

samiya bashir

Carnot Cycle

Only sometimes does homegrown bedrock glow moneygreen. Sometimes rock whines mommy. Sometimes rock coos baby. Sometimes rock calls late with the mortgage. Sometimes rock knits shoulder blades right where you can’t pluck.

Early mornings something doesn’t sit right over the sink. Sits crooked. Slumps askew. Body doesn’t lay the way you left it. Squinting gets you nowhere. You squat to the floor and feel around. Stop. Smell for it. Shrug. Still some dangling something modifies you. Smackdab midchest you feel lumpy empty. Sniff. Sniff.

Shrug.

Like those days we grab our own pickaxes and head down to the mine. We hum worksongs. We sing hymns. We chip worry stone. We gather moss. We lie flat. We scratch at the mineshaft. Not toward exit but deeper to the core.

32 POETRY

Consequences of the Laws of Thermodynamics

When Albert Murray saidthe second law adds up tothe blues that in other wordsain’t nothing nothing he meant it

not quite the way my pops saysnomads don’t show emotionsbut more how my grandmotherwarned that men like women

with soft hands blood rednails like how Mingus meanttruth if you had time for itfacts if you got no time that

years pass. Zeroone two three andthe man you used

to flirt with you canno longer flirt withthank goodness.

He’s now a manyou can’t wearyour jaw out on

about weathernews or work

a perfectstrawberry

33SAMIYA BASHIR

buriedbeneath

a peck.

34 POETRY

matthew zapruder

American Singer

In memory of Vic Chesnutt

when I walkto the mailboxholding the letterthat fails to sayhow sorry I amyou feel your callor any words at allon that daywould have stoppedthe great singerwho long agodecided morequickly throughto moveI notice probablybecause you wrotethat strangeword funeralthe constant blackfabric I thinkis taffetaalways drapedover the scaffoldsthe figuresscraping paintare wearing dustyprotective suitsand to each othersaying nothingI move invisiblylike a breezearound three menwearing advanced

35MATTHEw ZAPRUDER

practically weightlessjackets imperviousto all possibleweather evena hurricaneI hear them saysomething Germanthen photographthe pale blueturrets that floating up in fogseem nobleheads fullof important thoughtslike what revolutioncould make us happyfrom some windowwandering hornshe was threewhen I was bornfor a long timeI had no ideasmy father workedin a private officefull of quietpeople workingI came to visitit seemed correctI went to collegestudied thingsdyed my hairfelt a ragedisguised as lovekept escapingsuffering only

36 POETRY

a few broken boneseverything healednow I livein Californiawhere in somered and goldentheater I sawhim howlsuch unfathomableforce from onlyone lungit was oneof his last showsin Athens oncemany yearsago we shareda cigarettea little smokefrom our facesI can’t rememberso many thingsbut see himin his wheelchairhis folded bodyit’s all gonebut for electronsI can still pushinto my earsI choose the songthe perfect onehear his wordsand seethe mirrorin the ancientlighthouse blinking

37MATTHEw ZAPRUDER

brave shipssomehowyou crossedthe water carryingwhat we needyou can restlight as nothingin the harborwe will take itand go on

38 POETRY

Poem for Bill Cassidy

I wish I wouldlike a shipthat all night carriesits beloved captainsleeping throughno weatherslip past dawnand wake with nothingbut strange thingsthat did not happento reportbut I get upin the darkand parachutequietly downto the kitchento beginthe purely mentalritual pluggingin of the uselessworry machineabove meshe sleepslike the innocentstill dreaming oldersister to allgentle thingsthe white screenimpassively asksme to say whatdoes not matterdoes so I shutit down and thinkabout the lakenear where I live

39MATTHEw ZAPRUDER

it’s a lagoongetting lighterlike an old bluejust switched ontelevisionmaybe a Zenithit has two armsthey stretchwithout feelingeast to embracean empty parka little lightthen everythinghas a shadowI almost heara silent belllow voicesI brought usto this old citythe port connectsto the worldwhere everyonepretends to knowthey liveon an islandwaiting forthe giant wavein some formmaybe radiationin the yardthe wind blowsthe whole blacksky looks downfor an instantthrough my sleepy

40 POETRY

isolate framea complex childhologram flickersangrily holdinga green plastic shovelthen disappearsleaving an emptycolumn waitingBill who I knewwas so angryis deadwhatever he wasgoing throughI kept awayI never didanythingI love his poemhe was really goodI keep forgettinghis last nameI always leavehis handmade bookon my desknot to rememberbut because for hoursafter everythingeveryone sayssounds like a languageI never knewbut now speakspirit I knowyou would have hatedhow I thinkyou would have likedthis music

41MATTHEw ZAPRUDER

in another roompushing the alienvoice intothe millenniumthe one you leftso earlyspirityou were rightall noblethings are goneexcept to struggleand be loved

42 POETRY

mark bibbins

Factory

He can say it was a paintingHe can say we were the paintingOr that the painting wasn’t paintingAnd that we only happen to ourselves

We can say we kept things runningby distracting ourselves from the hideous truth of how things run

That we were brokenThat we lingered near a broken factoryThat we had broken

We can say that the disappointment of slicing into a leek and not finding the requisite layersbut a thick white inedible core is not the disappointment of approaching a sleeping animal only to learn that it is deadbut it does nudge one slightly further into despair

We said despair We meant the strings of impossible instruments that they made in the factoryThat we had seenThat were brokenThat there were different paintingsThat could be played as songs

We had seen other thingsThat we had seen

43MARk BIBBINS

That had come unstrungand blown between adjacent bridgeswhose river had presented us a cityThat was brokenThat we had beenThat we were brokenThat was our cityThis was our citythat was a song replaying itself in the dark

44 POETRY

karen an-hwei lee

On Hierophany

One example of hierophany is the apparition of angels. This is a new word I overheard this morning. It occurswhen the divine realm manifests — or the word intrudes — into our quotidian realm. The natural one, an untidy fleshliness of the ordinary. Or the sacred and profaneis another way to say this. I asked whether it is a hernia, and the answer was no. A herniated condition is viscera on viscera — a disc, organs, the skin, or nerves. Besides, such a comparison would be profane. A figure of speech already exists, I said, in a hieratic silence of cursive writing long ago dead. Not long ago, those two phrases dwelled in separate worlds. I dare you to use the word hernia in a poem, said a friend. So I not only usedthe word, I invited God into language. Or God existed before language, while God is also the word. Remember, all theophanies are forms of hierophany. However,the converse is not always true — not all hierophaniesare theophanies — or God visible in our world.

45MIcHAEl EARl cRAIG

michael earl craig

Night Nurse

This night nurse is different.She walks into my room and does not turn the light on.She thinks I am sleeping.I have just barely opened my left eye,am looking through the slightest slit,as moonlight exposes the roomfor what it really is — a collectionof surfaces; lines and planes, mostly.The night nurse puts a foot up on the radiatorand braces her clipboard on her kneeas she appears to take down a few notes.I imagine she is working on a sonnet,and that her ankle looks like polished walnut.You imagine she is working on a crossword,and that her feet are killing her.The slightest slit is like an old gateat a Japanese tea garden at night,in the rain, that is supposed to be closed,that is supposed to be locked.

“Someone has locked up poorly,” you’d say.“Incorrectly.” But no one has asked you.

46 POETRY

Advice for Horsemen

When trying to catch a horse it helps if you look away.Eye contact just pisses them off.But you can’t fake looking away, horsesknow when you are doing this.You have to really look away.Some horsemen never come out of this.

47MIcHAEl EARl cRAIG

In a Grove

Kurosawa was a moralist.It is said he took and gently bentAkutagawa’s grove.

Akutagawa was trying to showus something. It is said he worecold wet gloves when he wrote.

48 POETRY

najwan darwish

Mary

My mother is obsessed with reading about Jesus these days.

I see books piled by her bed, most of them borrowed from my library: novels, handbooks, sectarian polemics, writers coming to blows. Sometimes when I’m passing by her room she calls on me to step between them and resolve their disputes. (A little while ago I came to the aid of a historian called Kamal Salibi, whose forehead had been split open by a Catholic stone.)

What a diligent reader she is when she’s searching for Jesus, this woman I never failed to disappoint: I was not martyred in the first intifada, nor in the second, nor in the third. And just between you and me, I won’t be martyred in any future intifada either, nor will I be killed by some booby-trapped stork.

As she reads, her orthodox imagination crucifies me with every page.... while I do nothing but supply it with more books and nails.

49NAjwAN DARwISH

Want Ad

I need a strict managerand an energetic secretaryand a correspondent to make my coffeeand my teaI need an intellectualand a poetand a mafia godfatherto divide my life among them

And I’ll announce, after a whilemy bankruptcylike the companies do

I need a servantand a traitora lover to have me murderedbeaten to deathby sandals in the bath:I need a queento betray me with the king

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A Moment of Silence

And what did the Armenians say?

An Umayyad monkspins wheat and wool above us

Time is a scarecrow

•

That’s what the Armenians said

Translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

51cHARlES BERNSTEIN

charles bernstein

Me and My Pharaoh ...

[facsimile]

He awoke,

fully charged. You

can

bring water to a horse but you can’t

make it ride. All poetry is conceptual

but some is more

conceptual

than others.

Ambient difficulty leads to poetic

license. Poetry has

no purpose

&

that is not its

pur-

pose.

You have to get over

52 POETRY

be- in- g over. April is the cruelest month for poetry. And May

is not much better, is

it?

Why write in prose what you could write as easily

as

poetry?

The poem is a crutch that allows us to think with

and throu-

g- h it.

Every poem must have 13 distinct frames, devices, motifs, styles, forms, or

concepts. Poetry emasculates prose.

The body: can’t live with it, can’t live without

i-t.

53cHARlES BERNSTEIN

I want to be understood,

just not by you.

Last week’s weather is worth a pound of salt, just like the lot of wives or the snowy pillars of Danton.

There’s not a crowd in the sky. Familiarity breeds

content. Yesterday’s

weather is as

beyond reach as tomorrow’s

dreams. The

move away from close reading often got drowned in the

bathwater, even if we could never find the baby. I wouldn’t join a poetic

tradition that would recognize me as

a

member. The wheel needs

to be reinvented because we’re still

stuck.

I am for almost new art (gently used forms) — easier on the pocket-book and on

54 POETRY

the b-

rain (undergarments not accepted). The only true

innovation is God’s. Others pay cash.

This is a lie and that’s the truth.

Better truth in the shade than a lie in the sun.

The taste of madeleine ain’t

what it used to be.

(taint what it used to be)

...

all alone and feeling

...

Operators are on duty. Call now.

As dry as a bubble, as expectant as the dead

of night. Without product placement, poetry as we know it cannot sur-

55cHARlES BERNSTEIN

vive.

Poetry should not be in the service of art any more than religion, ideology, or morality. Poetry should be in the service of nothing — and not even that.

If you can identify someone as gnostic they are probably

not

gnostic enough,

for my money.

I believe in my disbelief, have faith in my reason.

The sacred in a poem is nowhere seen and everywhere

felt. There’s

more to transgression than

ritual, but not enough

more. There is more

to liturgy than doctrine,

once in a blue

m-

oo- n.

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I left my purpose in my other pants.

You’re not the only paddle in the ocean, shadow in the dark, line in the poem, lobster in the trap, pot on the stove, wheel on the truck, letter on the keypad, scythe in the field, lever on the controls, cloud in the sky, fruit in the tree, rat in the lab.

Reality is usually a poor copy of the imitation. The original is an echo of what is yet to be.

Time is neither linear nor circular; it is excremental.

Beauty is the memory of the loss of time.

Memory is the reflection of the loss of beauty.

American poetry suffers from its lack of

uncreativity. I have no faith in faith, or hope for hope, no belief in belief, no doubt of doubt.

They say God is in the details. That’s because the Devil has the rest

covered.

God is weak and imaginary — a flickering possibility. The dogma of an

57cHARlES BERNSTEIN

omniscient and omnipotent God maligns hope and denies the sacred, as it turns its back on the world.

God has no doctrine, no morality, no responsibility. To sin against God is to use that name to justify any action or prohibition, whether murder or martyrdom.

I’ve got authenticity, you’ve got dogma ... proclaimeth the Lord.

Saying one more time: It’s true but I don’t believe it I believe it but it’s not so.

“My logic is all in the melting pot.” [wittgenstein]

Better an old cow than a dead horse. Alzheimer’s:

What’s that again? So it turns out I’m

not a bull in a china shop but china in a

bulls’

shop. Sometimes a penis is just a s-

y- m-

b- ol.

In their gloom, the Jews go and comeTalking of Bergen-Belsen.

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(I saw time but it didn’t return my gaze.)

My heart is like a water bucket that returns from the river

seven times full eighth

empty.

Zeno and Heraklitus are my father’s milk.

I think with the poem not thr-

ou-

g-

h

it. Turns

of phrase / my stock in

trade. Negative capability: sure. But also positive

incapacity. I always

hear echoes and reverses

when I am listening to language. It’s

the field of my consciousness.

59cHARlES BERNSTEIN

When we stop making — manufacturing, imposing — sense then we have a chance

to find it.

A professional poet throws nothing out except the eggshells and the coffee grounds.

I think the idea is to be unoriginal but in as original a way a- s possible.

Poets are the Pershings

of the imaginary: piercing

themselves as they perish

in spite of native ground.

I wish I was still in my pajamas.

The unironized life is not worth living.

When people tell that joke, three Jews four opinions, what they don’t say is that two of them, the schmucks, have the same opinion, while the third ...

Ouzo something to me and it ain’t pretty.

Absinthe makes the heart gro-

w

foreigner.

60 POETRY

“Throughout this prospectus, ‘object’ refers to the digitized file.”

Yesterday is a stone’s throw from tomorrow

& each new year a vast canvas of impossibility.

Kalip in North Folk, you’re on the air.

Stand clear of the clo-

sing

doors.

•

Too much is still

not enough.

•

Blameless as a sheep at slaughter, am I Guileless as the toll of tidal tug

There are no absolutes except this.

It was a veritable bow across the shot.

“Sacred means saturated with being.” [berssenbrugge]

So does scared. So does scarred.

COMMENT

63MIcHAEl klEIN

michael klein

Risk Delight: Happiness and the “I” at the End of the World

This is the glimpse of the god you were never supposed to get. — Laura Kasischke

I’ve been thinking about the end of the world for as long as I’ve been in it. It was my primary childhood fear — a projection, any adult outside my door might have said, of my off-kilter family life. The end was going to come because China and Russia were enemies of America and eventually one of them was going to drop a nuclear bomb on America and especially New York City, where I lived on 12th Street. And it would all happen without warning, in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Thank God for the movies my mother took me and my twin brother, Kevin, to — even if they were way too pro-vocative (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Pumpkin Eater). Like many women of her time, my mother was lonely in a marriage.

I’ve moved only slightly away from the fear I invented in child-hood; most of the nuclear family is dead, and there are days — end of summer days, especially — when I forget about the end of the world completely, even as it teeters on its axis more hazardously than ever before. The world — I’ve concluded — is simply a machine that will eventually blow from two opposite bad habits in collision: neglect and overuse. And like the beings that inhabit it, hasn’t the earth always been in some phase of departure? We all know this. But there are poets who draw on it for inspiration.

Dana Levin and Laura Kasischke (among others) contributed po-ems as part of a 2012 New York Times feature called — with a cloying kind of aw-shucks sentimentality — “It’s the End of the World,” trig-gered by the infamous Mayan calendar prediction about the end to civilization. Generic as it was — in an effort, I suppose, to lighten the message — the title still couldn’t diffuse the seriousness of the poetry that followed it. “Morning News” by Dana Levin ends like this:

The death of ice, of food, of space, what we call Doom —

which might be a bending —

64 POETRY

a flow of permissions —

to forge a mutant form —

Time is almost always ambiguous in a poem that lasts — nonlin-ear, cosmically (or comically) stacked, ordered like a dream. And the central idea in “Morning News” is that the end is the beginning of something else or — more trenchant — somewhere else. Or, that the world ending is not quite finished with the imagination it uses to keep it intact — eulogized in the concluding lines of another Levin poem, “At the End of My Hours”:

I couldn’t quite

quit some ideas — trees and chocolate

I couldn’t stop yammering

over the devastated earth

pining for nachos — prescription drugs

and a hint of spring, though I could see

the new desert — its bumper-crop

of bone and brick

from shipwrecked cities — where now

the sons and daughters of someone tough

are on the hunt for rat — the scent of meat

however mean and a root

sending an antenna up, to consider

greening — what poems built their houses for

65MIcHAEl klEIN

once, in a blindered age, teaching us

the forms we felt, in rescue — hoarded-up scraps

whirling around my cave

trying to conjure peaches

The poem staggers along like the charting of a fever dream — the way that bedraggled father and son stagger along in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — through the apocalyptic end of a world that’s collapsed, even though Levin’s future-speaker (or is she just crazy?) isn’t ready to quit yet. She’s held to the idea of living because she still has the capacity to remember something.

This haunting displacement (or is it stubbornness?) informs a very different poem about endings: Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend” (I’m thinking of the Stephen Mitchell translation), in which a woman’s recent death is nuanced by her ghostly return that feels, to the poet, way too early:

I have my dead, and I have let them go,and was amazed to see them so contented,so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,so unlike their reputation. Only youreturn; brush past me, loiter, try to knockagainst something, so that the sound revealsyour presence.

As it is in many Rilke poems of spiritual restlessness (the world stops and eventually goes back to where it was, but changed), Levin’s

“Morning News” ends on a turn and invents a place that occurs without the inconvenience of human beings or, at the very least, advocates for a different kind of being: forged, mutant.

The mutant is either made by the world advancing, splitting off, or devolving. Or the mutant enters the world as something from be-yond our atmosphere. I’m thinking mostly of the movies (Invaders from Mars and even, in its way, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) where the stranger comes to town (in a spaceship, as it happens) to signify the end of the world — particularly since these movies were all made in the fifties, the height of America’s atomic bomb testing program.

66 POETRY

The interplanetary messenger is always bringing some version of doomsday down with him.

By now we’ve been living with the end of the world as a subject long enough for it to be mythic by not happening. “The nuclear age produced a nuclear consciousness and nuclear psyche, but not a nuclear imagination,” wrote Steve Erickson in an essay called

“The Apocalypse — Stay Tuned.” “Those few who have [a] nuclear imagination not only confront the abyss but are liberated by it,” he continues, which is exactly where, consciously or unconsciously, poets like Dana Levin live (and, as it happens — says Erikson — where Billie Holiday and Walt Disney lived, too). The nuclear imagina-tion — in a more literal ideation — has also made catastrophe the trope of choice in the American disaster movie (if you can’t see the end, it’s not there), which gives poets the freedom to look at apoca-lypse as a gateway to a language that describes something even bigger: the threat of an empty universe — a phrase Alberta Turner once used to describe the poems of Jean Valentine — in which the real subject is silence.

How does one write their way into such an inevitability without resisting it? Or is the poem that faces the world in conclusion just an open invitation to make something complicated read as simplistic? (Think of the overly obvious poems written after 9 /11 that couldn’t get out of the way of two towers and four airplanes). Jim Schley’s seminal anthology Writing in a Nuclear Age, published originally as a special issue of the New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly in 1983, consisted of prose and poetry that dealt with the nuclear idea of extinction before those longer eves of destruction — terror-ism and climate change — had revealed themselves in the theater of interpretation. Some of the work in the book is naive and unimagina-tive; some of it is appropriately haunting. “When,” by Sharon Olds, couples nuclear anxiety with a kind of suburban malaise:

I wonder now only when it will happen,when the young mother will hear thenoise like somebody’s pressure cookerdown the block, going off. She’ll go out in the yard,holding her small daughter in her arms,and there, above the end of the street, in theair above the line of the trees,she will see it rising, lifting up

67MIcHAEl klEIN

over our horizon, the upper rim of thegold ball, large as a giantplanet starting to lift up over ours.She will stand there in the yard holding her daughter,looking at it rise and glow and blossom and rise,and the child will open her arms to it,it will look so beautiful.

Instead of driving predictable panic through a scene of predictable panic, Olds turns the poem in another direction. Awe and surrender end the stanza, but they are also there to meet the indelible and chill-ing opening declaration: I wonder now only when it will happen. It’s not only the world that ends, but a kind of thinking about the world, too.

William Stafford’s “Next Time” uses the threat of extinction to talk about the quality of attention when it is lifted by future-hope:

Next time what I’d do is look atthe earth before saying anything. I’d stopjust before going into a houseand be an emperor for a minuteand listen better to the wind or to the air being still.

When anyone talked to me, whetherblame or praise or just passing time,I’d watch the face, how the mouthhad to work, and see any strain, anysign of what lifted the voice.

And for all, I’d know more — the earthbracing itself and soaring, the airfinding every leaf and feather overforest and water, and for every personthe body glowing inside the clothes like a light.

If writing the nuclear threat has been eclipsed by a slower mov-ing catastrophe, it’s an important distinction when considering the end of the world as something that reconfigures the language used to talk about it. Because the end will probably be up to the world itself

68 POETRY

and not decided by a button on a control panel behind the curtain at some Cold War’s secret Oz location — how I used to think when I was masterminding my childhood. The intent and function of the

“I” in a poem of apocalypse written now pulls further and further away from the ego and, in many instances, the political. The “I” in the Olds poem has now grown into the one who sees beyond a merely radioactive horizon — underscoring an overwhelming paradox: the end of the world as a philosophy about the end of the world. Which is lucky for poetry. Nothing is literal until it actually happens.

End of Days — the slogan, the commodity, the live wire sending its current through the hand of the poet writing about it — has, of course, become unavoidable as we draw closer to it. Levin suggests that we are already in the end of something — if not the world, at least the thinking around the idea that the world never ends. And other poets have always let the end of time influence — even if fleet-ingly — their ethos in at least one of their books: Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; Laura Kasischke’s Space, in Chains; Adrienne Rich’s Tonight No Poetry Will Serve; Chase Twichell’s The Ghost of Eden; Louise Glück’s A Village Life; Jorie Graham’s Place; and two books published in 2013, Christina Davis’s An Ethic and The Cloud That Contained the Lightning by Cynthia Lowen, the latter a book of poems that speaks through J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atom bomb,” who serves as the book’s conflicted persona.

All of these books are extraordinary and I would also have to in-clude on that list — though it may not be an obvious choice — Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires. When he died in November of 2012, Gilbert interrupted the books I was reading because I had to stop and go back to his work (you always want to hear someone’s voice again immediately after they die to be certain the world didn’t end what they sounded like) and to the poems before The Great Fires for a sense of the whole life he gave us — writing in the voice of a man in survival: a dramatic whisper, sounding, Look! Here’s what’s left. The end of the world in a Gilbert poem is a subject that enlarges the “I” into someone witnessing personal experience, but also the world experiencing being the world. Here, in its entirety, is what may be Gilbert’s poem of core belief — “A Brief for the Defense”:

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babiesare not starving someplace, they are starvingsomewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

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But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would notbe made so fine. The Bengal tiger would notbe fashioned so miraculously well. The poor womenat the fountain are laughing together betweenthe suffering they have known and the awfulnessin their future, smiling and laughing while somebodyin the village is very sick. There is laughterevery day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,we lessen the importance of their deprivation.We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must havethe stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthlessfurnace of this world. To make injustice the onlymeasure of our attention is to praise the Devil.If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.We must admit there will be music despite everything.We stand at the prow again of a small shipanchored late at night in the tiny portlooking over to the sleeping island: the waterfrontis three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboatcomes slowly out and then goes back is truly worthall the years of sorrow that are to come.

We must risk delight, the poem instructs us, and to live to an end that has magnitude; to take on happiness, in spite of the world trying to eat happiness. To fight for it; to know that it isn’t only a possibility, but one of the necessities of life. We must have / the stubbornness to ac-cept our gladness in the ruthless / furnace of this world. The poem makes joy an even larger and essential human condition by framing it with dread. There is laughter / every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta.

Jack Gilbert’s poems are complex and spiritually audacious. He is also part of a rare breed of writers who see the world as a love object (Nazim Hikmet and Seamus Heaney are like this, too) while still feel-ing the sharpness of its blade, which makes the poems bigger in the mind than they appear on the page. (The poems in The Great Fires

70 POETRY

are never longer than one stanza). And because, even in their mea-sured gestures of longing, they are also poems willing to be overtaken by the world’s stark and sometimes sudden outbreaks of beauty, they feel written in a way that could be read as one long footnote referring back to Hokusai’s iconic The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Something formidable is about to hit the shore, but is caught in the last phase of what makes it catastrophic. Perhaps, like Dana Levin, and all the other singers underground, Jack Gilbert considered the end of the world his muse and not the iconic disaster popular culture would have us believe it to be — an invitation for his mind to go inside the lyric, without sounding the alarm.

To go inside that particular lyric takes a kind of psychic will that in-tuits the edge of the abyss — the what-is-ness that gives a poem about the end of the world its sense of liberation and what gave — back to the Erickson essay — Billie Holiday her voice. Writing in the Nuclear Age was my first exposure to a certain poetry of danger and the understanding that Armageddon was something poets have been thinking about for a long time. Today, I think that same subject has taken hold of a lexicon that is more elliptical and unsettling than it was in the poems Schley included for his anthology. The new writing about the end of the world (or is it for the end of the world?) may simply be an extension of our moral outrage against corporate greed and various forms of biotechnology — the way, in my childhood, I looked to the nuclear threat scenario as a more workable explanation for why my household felt threatening. Childhood is the laboratory for making meaning and mine was helped along through absorbing the images I saw on television in all those old science fiction and inva-sion movies. The alien metaphor wasn’t lost on me because I, too, felt like a stranger in a strange land.

I’m going to be sixty on my next birthday, and I’ve gone from watching space invaders, body snatchers, and radioactive insects to becoming mildly obsessed, like other Americans, with the vampire and the shapeshifter and, just last week, the resurrected as they are depicted in the French thriller series The Returned — about a random group of dead villagers who return to the land of the living years after they died and try to resume their lives with as little bother as possible after devastating their small idyllic mountain community with their reappearance.

What’s different about the returned is that they have none of the usual signs (insatiable hunger, bad skin) that mark a zombie’s life.

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And, even more crucial, they’re not even certain they’re dead un-til somebody tells them they are. In other words, they all look and sound like you and me and the world coming to an end is the farthest thing from their minds because it ended already. Sort of. Life after life is their version of the rapture. But being dead is not the same thing as being erased. And what the poets are telling me — some of them, and many of the ones I love — is that the dilemma of being alive at the beginning of the twenty-first century (after taking into account the unending casualties of war) is the possibility that I won’t get to have my own death; “we were young we knew how to die / but not how to last,” Mark Conway says at the hinge of his poem, “in the ruins.” And I think in that lowercase, nonpunctuated statement, he identifies the essential question of our time.

And, speaking of time — my copy of Writing in a Nuclear Age is thirty years old. I wonder why I’ve kept it all these years. It’s a good book, but not a great book, and it even started coming apart a few months ago. Maybe I still have it so I can come back to the haunting photograph on the cover — from FIRE, a play by Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater. I actually dropped the book the other day and all the pages came loose and scattered to the floor. And as I was putting them back, I knew they were out of order, which — I was magically thinking — may have made the poems lose all the danger that was there when they first appeared.

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rebecca hazelton

Three Reviews

Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, by Daisy Fried. University of Pittsburgh Press. $15.95.

As a title, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice suggests an earnest, sev-enties anthology aimed at redressing literary gender inequality, the kind of well-meaning effort that now seems slightly retrograde and isolating to those of us fortunate enough to have benefited from ear-lier feminist movements. Fried’s arch title, and the poem of the same name, which begins, “I, too, dislike it,” seems to dismiss the rele-vance of these sorts of movements and classifications, but the book as a whole presents a much more complex picture of the relationships between gender, work, family, and power.

Women’s Poetry contrasts the realities of contemporary experi-ence for a professional female poet with the hopes and aspirations of second-wave feminism. In much of the book, Fried strikes a sardonic tone and her primary mode is that of ironic distance — a sharp coun-terpoint to the earnestness of those movements she engages. This is at times humorous, but can also come off as jaded, and Women’s Poetry may be a good diagnostic tool for gauging one’s optimism about the state of poetry and the position of women in the field.

If, as so many like to bemoan, only poets read poetry, the concerns raised in this book regarding adjuncting, the increasing commodi-fication of education, the effects of pregnancy on academic job prospects, the territoriality of various poetry schools, and the inabil-ity of the individual to effect meaningful change in the world will hit terribly close to home, and will also seem terribly familiar. The last section of the book is a long prose poem called “Ask The Poetess: An Advice Column,” which originally ran in Poetry’s 2006 humor issue. The poem reads much like it sounds — a Miss Lonelyhearts for poets, fielding questions about what is and isn’t women’s poetry, the proper use of “poetess,” and the best SSRIs for life after the MFA. The experiences detailed here are common to many poets, but rarely the subject of poetry. It will strike some readers as funny and pointed, while others will merely see it as a collection of winking in-jokes. I’d say it’s both.

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The female body is a constant in many of these poems, especially when pregnant. It’s novel to read a poem that casually mentions how uncomfortable it is to get up from seated when pregnant, and the surprise of that novelty speaks volumes about what is and isn’t con-sidered important in contemporary literature. Likewise, more than one poem marks personal time by whether or not the speaker is preg-nant or is debating pregnancy and, in the context of job uncertainty, these moments heighten the poems’ tensions. As Fried writes, “one must have a womb of snow” to proceed at all.

There are other poems, however, in which the emphasis on re-production and female body parts can feel a bit jammed in, as if too much time had elapsed without reminding the reader the speaker is a woman. For example, “Il Penseroso: The Fat Lady,” one of two poems about commuting:

She saw this drivingalong, the veins of her breaststhe same blue as old roads, the carsdrag their red lights, movable puddles, behind them.

In this poem, Fried’s use of italics indicates a shift from a speaking to an observed self, but despite this distancing technique, it’s startling and gratuitous when the POV burrows under the speaker’s clothes.

Fried’s use of the female body is particularly effective when it serves not just as a reminder of the speaker’s sex, but is positioned as the subject of historical, political, or economic experience. In the long poem, “Attenti Agli Zingari,” Fried sums up a moment in time not only historically and politically, but bodily:

Empty Gypsy camps are bulldozed by the authorities.A stench of casual outdoor shitting remains.The dollar hits 1.40 against the Euro. I turn 40.Maisie’s eleven months old.

Here, naked facts are juxtaposed with bodily experience with seem-ingly equal weight. The destruction of the camps is positioned in terms of the state of the global economy, and the speaker’s age as well as her daughter’s. All are measured against each other, and against the stench of human feces.

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In Women’s Poetry, the poems that move the farthest from the central concerns of the book are often the most interesting. In the excellent poem “Kissinger at the Louvre (Three Drafts),” Fried looks at a minor moment in the life of a major figure — Kissinger ducking into a car — from various angles, all of them unflattering. Kissinger’s aphrodisiacal power is not in evidence as he “totters befuddled by cul-pability, / luncheon champagne and dotage.” Instead it’s the speaker who holds the power (or anyone who notices, though most do not), who could place “Kissinger in front of The Raft of the Medusa / blink-ing at his father weeping for his son” or:

gazing reflectively at The Death of Sardanapalus, a Potentatepresiding amid an exorbitance of fabricsover his imminent suicide by fire,slaves bringing in, in order of importance,horses, gems, plate and favored concubinesfor slaughter. I’m not that kind of poet.

Fried’s speaker refuses to grant Kissinger a grand, tragic moment. Instead, in the final section, a passerby accidentally photographs

“portly little Kissinger”:

In Osaka, Oslo or Wasilla,Alaska some weeks later, a woman at her kitchen tableuploads Paris vacation photos to her laptop.

“Who’s that behind me?” A dark figure. “He looks familiar.”“How should I know,” says her husband.“I’m trying to get Baby to eat more potato.”“Oh well. I look fat in it,” she says. And deletes.

The photograph of Kissinger is erased, but unwittingly so. Addressing public experience through the lens of the personal is standard liter-ary practice, but Fried’s poem suggests ignorance shapes our record of history as much as or more than anything else. It’s a funny, bleak move, in which obliviousness has the last say. It’s an echo of a ques-tion the book raises but doesn’t answer — if day-to-day life suggests past feminist movements have done all they could and are now out-moded, is that perception true, or a product of our own weariness?

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Milk and Filth, by Carmen Giménez Smith. The University of Arizona Press. $15.95.

Both Daisy Fried’s Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice and Carmen Giménez Smith’s Milk and Filth share an interest in feminist tradi-tions, but their methods of engagement are very different. Fried’s book takes a more sidelong, ironic approach, using brief or sustained narratives to highlight gender inequalities, among other concerns. In contrast, Smith’s Milk and Filth is far more direct and almost irony-free, with poems addressing women’s experience via feminist theory, historical and literary figures, frank depictions of the female body, and bracing manifestos. The legacy of feminist movements aren’t just evoked, they are out-and-out stated.

A book of this scope runs the risk of reading like Intro to Women’s Studies, and certainly Smith name checks Our Bodies, Ourselves, Andrea Dworkin, and Simone de Beauvoir, while unapologetically referring to “lady lumps,” “meconium,” and “blood,” among a pro-fusion of other body fluids and parts. Yet there’s real range displayed here, and if Smith’s economical language and fine control can’t save the book entirely from didacticism that isn’t a charge Smith seems worried about. Instead some of these poems make an argument for the didactic in the most positive sense of the word — informative and instructive. In this way Milk and Filth is so retro that it feels bracing-ly fresh. More than once I found myself raising my eyebrows while reading these poems, asking myself can she do that? and answering my own question with yes, she can, and then awesome.

Not all of Milk and Filth is so surprising. The first section of the book, titled “Gender Fables,” is a tour of female figures and arche-types, some well known, some obscure. Lolita, Baba Yaga, Dorothy, and Phaedra make appearances. Many of these poems share DNA with Alice Fulton’s versions of Daphne and Apollo in Sensual Math — voice-driven retellings of myth, peppered with playful anachronisms. In these, Smith’s work is adept but covers familiar ground. The poems are more remarkable when Smith engages with history, race, and culture. In the poem “(Malinché),” Smith offers an account of the historical figure of the same name, a Nahua woman in the complicated position of slave, mistress, and translator to Cortés. The historical Malinché has been variously portrayed as traitor, vic-tim, or mother of the Mexican people, but Smith’s portrayal neither venerates nor vilifies. Her complicated Malinché aims to enact a

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subtle, yet radical power:

She tells them she plans to inter our dialectinto theirs, our divinity. She wants mongrel dictionsto add to her arsenal. She wants to be lord.

The precision of Smith’s word choice is on display here. The devas-tation that will befall the culture of the native people of Mexico is packed into that death-laden “inter”; the warlike “arsenal” acknowl-edges how language can conquer but also reclaim, while making us wonder what other weapons Malinché might have stowed away. The final line is both audacious and poignant, her desire to rule through language a sharp reminder of the few other forms of power she had.

The book’s showstopper is the long poem “Parts of an Autobiography,” where 111 numbered statements parcel out tan-talizingly terse snippets of autobiography while tackling aesthetics, literary lineage, feminism, what poems should be and do, and how those requirements alter over one’s lifetime. The poem’s power stems from one statement building on another. Some lines are prose-like declaratives, others euphonic, and the best are both.

17. When I first began writing poetry, first began thinking of poetry, I was certain that I could rely on the I / eye, which turned out to be the most elusive quality.

18. So squeezed, wince you I scream? I love you and hate off with you.

19. Sylvia Plath’s work gives me synaesthetic pleasure. The speaker’s self-mortification perverted the edges of all her lines with sweetish vinegar.

20. Her poetry was pungent when so little poetry is pungent. Poetry of regimented epiphany smelled like fabric softener when I was young.

21. I liked my poetry to smell like I had forgotten my deodorant. You could smell me from across the table. I liked my work to smell of work and fuck.

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In these lines, Smith questions a poetic reliance on subjectivity, highlights the delight and disaster of homophones, misprision, and upset syntax, and explains Plath’s appeal, while doling out one of the more scathing descriptions of bland lyric poetry I’ve read. (Perhaps only bested by another line where Smith refers to “unseasoned- quinoa-Sharon-Olds-esque” poetry.) The poem intercuts opinions on poets and poetic styles, types, and figures with conflicting views of the speaker’s role as woman, as in “73. I’m not a total cunt” and

“93. I’m a baby machine.” What begins as a portrait of the artist builds to a crescendo of manifestos:

99. I’ll write screeds, manifestos and epilogues on the merits of female domination.

100. I would like to act in resistance to the classist assumptions of post-feminism. I would like to write about gender folded into race and class folded into gender too.

101. This coup will bring back the little bit didactic, the little bit ham-fisted because it’ll be good for us.

102. This coup will be a collaboration of squabbling and seeing into the shared past to construct the shared future. I aestheticize all my struggles: complicated and as close to art, capital A, as I can do.

103. I like the crystalline tear like morning and climax with cry-ing of language that overflows with afterbirth and rainbows and applause. Those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!

It’s not a bad trick to acknowledge your blunt instrument as you wield it, and there’s a real pleasure in watching Smith tear down and rebuild our expectations. For some readers, however, a hammer is a hammer, and Smith’s project won’t work for them. It’s also fair to note that like some earlier feminist literatures, parts of Milk and Filth may seem dated in the future. I for one find this book one of the more invigorating collections of the past year.

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Signaletics, by Emilia Phillips. The University of Akron Press. $14.95.

If Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice suggests the present is ignorance and forgetting, and Milk and Filth unfurls a banner waving “forward march,” Emilia Phillips’s Signaletics seems intent on unearthing the forgotten in an archaeological study of the obscure and esoteric. The care and thoroughness of her revelations, no matter how minor, are evidence of her position on the value of the past. Phillips uses his-torical documents as the basis for many of the poems in her book, making Signaletics a demanding read, the sort whose “Notes” in the back aren’t entirely optional. “Signaletics,” for instance, is a term we learn comes from Alphonse Bertillon’s 1896 book Signaletic Instructions including the theory and practice of Anthropometrical Identification, and many of the poems use excerpts from that book as a springboard, as well as other (more current) methods of iden-tification, such as prints or teeth. These poems are most successful when this material is used sparingly, as in “The Ear: General Form & Separation of the Internal Windings,” where most of the emphasis is on the act of listening: the sound of a lock jimmied open, a mother

“listening / to the police radio / to my father,” and the adult daugh-ter listening for the sounds of criminal activity in her own house. Especially effective is the series of poems all titled “Bertillonage Fragment,” of which the fourth is particularly strong. Phillips’s aphoristic lines propel the reader through the poem with their quick concision while demanding their own reassessment:

regardless of the fullnessor color of the leaves many new

officers believewhen first hired every man

who says he’s innocentif one listens to birds

all his life he will not hear themanymore one day.

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Phillips shows in this poem, and in others, an ear for clear, com-pressed language that doubles back on itself. The leaves first signal seasons, and then suggest the multitude of criminals. As we advance through the enjambed, unpunctuated lines, the officers progress through their own seasons, first trusting and then inured. That the individual bird calls might possess beauty or truth becomes impos-sible to discern in a chorus of song, and the line “who says he’s innocent” is a question directed at the officers as well as the unheard claims of the men they police.

In poems like these, Signaletics is richly rewarding. At other times, the payoff is less certain. Personal threads run through the book regarding the speaker’s father, a family breakup, and an unspeci-fied illness — yet these narratives are difficult to piece together. It’s unclear, for instance, if the poems about the father are elegiac or whether the speaker’s illness is serious or passing or passingly serious. This makes it hard to assess the poems’ stakes. There are also repeated forensic images such as fingerprints which accrue power as they re-appear, while others, such as the many instances of teeth, seem to carry some obscure private significance. It’s fitting for a book using forensics as a frame to expect the reader to assemble the clues, but the complicated and various lenses through which we view a personal history can feel like needless circling, if not avoidance.

Phillips’s language is lovely overall, especially when she lets her-self linger on sensual matters:

The Kurdistan honey you sentI drizzled in warm sour mash

where it suspended mid-glass in viscous

curls. A girl from Tennessee drinks Tennesseewhiskey, joked the barman, unfoldinga napkin before me.

— From Post

The sibilance and assonance complement the honey’s sweetness, while the bartender tells the bad jokes bartenders tell. In the third section of “Triptych: Automata” Phillips describes a mechanical flute player and her language is an appropriate mix of musicality and accuracy:

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Twelve songs to prove faculty, nine bellows to forge & three pipes to transmit wind to the oral cavity

where a thin tongue controls release across the riser, activating the shaft with vibration while the fingers,

padded leather, piston their combinations on the keys — the rhythm, perfunctory — & the notes unwavering in intonation.

She may be describing perfunctory music, but hers is not. There are missteps in Phillips’s language, however, forced constructions or brief flirtations with poetic cliche, as in “child-sibling,” “besmearing upon the plate,” or “diaphanous sleep.” Phillips also loves a five- dollar word, and while many of these are illuminating and appropri-ate, they can also disrupt:

Behind you, encorona, the sun,& I in the grass, looking up, saw a planeinsectile (without my glasses) fly through your headin one ear & out the other.

— From Reading Joyce on U.S. Flight 2309

Putting aside “encorona,” it’s disappointing for the surreal image of a plane flying through one ear and out the other to be interrupted by

“insectile,” which takes away some of the image’s punch by explaining scale. Phillips writes assuredly enough elsewhere to trust her readers to follow.

But when Signaletics is firing on all cylinders Phillips marries esoteric knowledge, personal narrative, and language to create an illuminating whole, as in these lines from “The Study Heads”:

In the Physiologus,

Anonymous writes that when a lionessgives birth to her whelp, she brings it forth

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dead, and for three days, she minds it,unsleeping,

pacing in dimly orchestrated paths, her body weepingafterbirth,

until the sire — God, in the moralityof Anonymous,

though here, he’s known as Consequence — arrives, awakening the stillborn with his breath.

Of all the things I don’t believe, I believe this the most.

Phillips brings Anonymous’s strange account of lion birth to life. Her version, where the lion mother helplessly paces preordained tracks while waiting on divine intervention, beautifully illustrates the speaker’s desire for and refusal of an intercessory god. When Phillips writes like this her erudition and — should I say — heart are a knock-out combo.

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christina pugh

The Emily Dickinsons

The Gorgeous Nothings, by Emily Dickinson, ed. by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin. New Directions. $42.00 cloth; $39.95 paper.

Poetry and ephemera: despite the exhortations in Shakespeare’s sonnets, might there be an abiding affinity between the two? It can certainly seem that way in Jen Bervin’s and Marta Werner’s The Gorgeous Nothings, a (nothing if not gorgeous) new facsimile collec-tion of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems. By “envelope poems,” I don’t mean poems about envelopes, which is what the phrase would usually suggest in contemporary poetry parlance. I’m referring in-stead to poems written on envelopes, with facsimile versions of the envelopes reproduced — in this case, those that were held and scrib-bled on by Emily Dickinson herself. These are digitally preserved in almost tactile detail: you can nearly smell the musty paper scraps.

The Gorgeous Nothings has the aura of an earlier century, in which envelopes contained heartfelt sentences of great complexity — or perhaps the briefer, pithier messages of which Dickinson was also fond. Either way, as Bervin and Werner know, the envelope was charged with mystery and incipience in the moments before it was opened and then discarded. In The Gorgeous Nothings, it also trans-forms to an exiguous writing surface: Dickinson’s poems are like graffiti on small paper walls.

There is something going on here that Jacques Derrida called “archive fever,” or an infectious devotion to things preserved from the past. So how could we not catch fire? It can be thrilling to “read” these fleetly scratched poems — even as our eyes keep darting back to Bervin’s and Werner’s discreet print transcriptions of Dickinson’s sometimes-illegible handwriting. We can’t help but feel that we’re in the poet’s pocket, as Bervin suggests in her introduction:

All of the envelope poems are written in pencil. Unlike a foun-tain pen, a pencil stub, especially a very small one, fits neatly, at the ready, in the pocket of a dress.... Dickinson’s one surviving dress has a large external pocket on the right side, where her

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hand would fall easily at rest.

And if you care about poetry at all, who wouldn’t jump at the chance for that kind of intimacy? Billy Collins and Archibald MacLeish certainly would.

But Bervin and Werner want to offer their readers more than just immediacy. They also want to show us “the real deal” of Dickinson’s writing project, as opposed to the ways her poetry has been repro-duced in print editions. One could object that this point was made years ago in R.W. Franklin’s variorum editions of the poet’s work. But the envelope or “scrap” poems have not been widely available in fac-simile form until now. It’s also true that most nonspecialists are still reading Dickinson in standardized print versions, edited either by Franklin or Thomas H. Johnson — and the differences between those poems and the facsimiles here can be both fascinating and poignant.

Take, for example, Dickinson’s #1292 (“In this short Life”). In Franklin’s print edition, it consists of two pentameter lines: “In this short Life that only lasts an hour / How much – how little – is within our power.” In the Gorgeous Nothings version, Dickinson’s lines expand and contract to cover the reverse-triangular shape of an enve-lope’s flap, thus growing to six altogether (and retaining the variant word “merely” under “only”). As the envelope tapers, so too does Dickinson’s writing, enacting the “littleness” — and perhaps the tragic truncation — of the “Life” that is at issue. #1478, the congru-ently-shaped “One note from One Bird,” provides a similar marriage of paper shape and sense.

These poems can cause us to consider the mutability — and ul-timately the adaptability — of a metrical structure we might have assumed was stable. (It has often been noted how metrically “scan-nable” many of Dickinson’s letters can be, thus potentially troubling the distinction between poetry and prose.) This point is well taken and can inspire interesting thoughts about the liberation of meter from line. In other poems, however, it is not always clear what we should gain from the facsimile reproduction, or why it’s necessar-ily preferable to reading a print version. In most cases, as described above, expediency is not the collection’s selling point.

So after some moments of pleasure and epiphany, the question be-comes one of emphasis: what do we as readers want to take away from poetry? For many Dickinson manuscript scholars today, the interest is not so much in the disseminable or printable poem itself — that is,

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its repeatability in our voices, books, and lives — but in the way it adapted itself to the material constraints that may or may not have governed its having been physically written in the first place. In this view, the poem is a product of its immediate writerly environment. According to Susan Howe, who wrote the preface to The Gorgeous Nothings, Dickinson’s poems are “visual productions” that we can-not understand without seeing them in the settings of their original, handwritten forms. (According to Bervin, it was this directive that guided the production of the Gorgeous Nothings edition; to be sure, it seems to have inspired Werner’s later description of the envelope-writings as collages, birds, and holographs.) For Bervin and Werner, the collected poems of Emily Dickinson straddle the limits, and fray the boundaries, between poetry and visual art.

These claims don’t convince me, though, since Dickinson’s medi-um is never the painterly image (what Plato called the “natural sign”), but instead always the alphabet, or the so-called artificial sign, re-gardless of the poet’s chosen writing implements or manner of paper. I’m also too committed to the age-old genre of lyric poetry — and to Dickinson’s participation in it — not to think that calling these works

“visual productions” effectively squelches or even silences their aural qualities.

Still, I’m sure to be in the minority here among both scholars and poets. Howe has influenced a generation of manuscript scholars who see the idiosyncrasy of Dickinson’s handwriting, scraps, and fascicle production as integral to the way we should read her. And such con-cern with poetry’s “means of production” is admittedly timely. It’s in line with the concerns of at least two strands of poets writing in the present day: the metonymic bent of Language poets (with whom Howe has been a strange, if enduring, bedfellow), and poets writ-ing “born digital,” or hypertext, works. In these ways, Dickinson’s gorgeous envelopes underline the power of writers’ physical or tech-nological constraints — and suggest that the limits of our material technologies, whether electronic or flimsy as an old wrapper, can play as large a role in creative production as the more traditionally “formal” or aesthetic demands of, say, meter itself. (Probably the best twenti-eth-century version of what I’m talking about is the adding machine tape on which A.R. Ammons typed Tape for the Turn of the Year.)

Like poetry, scholarship probably works best when its time is of the essence. It has traditionally been easy — and, of course, in-accurate — to stereotype Dickinson as a recluse and loner. Today,

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Dickinson manuscript scholars may be overcompensating for their predecessors’ mistakes by overemphasizing the social, or epistolary, qualities of her work. And by drawing our attention to these envelope scraps — rather than, for example, to Dickinson’s carefully threaded, arranged, and hidden fascicles — some scholars want us to associate Dickinson with the ephemeral and the fragmentary: with the veneer, at least, of the aleatory or unfinished. (In a nod to “archive fever,” paper mail delivery is itself going the way of ephemera as I write — it is now almost a thing of the past.)

The delectable appeal of The Gorgeous Nothings will be obvious to poets: Dickinson’s fragments are visually exquisite, and Werner is the rare literary critic whose writing is beautiful and lyrical enough to be a prose poem of its own. The dangers of the production, in contrast, are much more oblique — and ultimately twofold, in my view. One is that, just as Dickinson’s first editors co-opted her work into a “sentimental” role that didn’t fit, now the “unfinished” aspects of the envelope poems may come to characterize her entire output. (Arguably, this has already happened.) This critical tack sways Dickinson towards experimental rather than lyric aesthetics. And when she’s “socialized” in the epistolary manner, the great poet becomes more stereotypically feminized and more domesticated than the content of her most important work warrants.

You may well ask why contemporary poets should care about these debates at all. The question of how to read and interpret Emily Dickinson may seem an antique, scholarly wrinkle that has no real relevance for contemporary artists. Yet Dickinson continues to be among the most indelible of influences in American poetry. We couldn’t get rid of her if we tried, and no one seems to want to try very hard to begin with. It’s difficult to imagine May Swenson, Jean Valentine, Lucie Brock-Broido, A.R. Ammons, Kay Ryan, and any number of poets without having had Dickinson’s work first. At this moment, I’m also remembering a poet who, for a while, used Dickinson’s famous portrait as an emblem on his personal stationery. How many others of us superimpose her diction or syntax on our own?

Dickinson is clearly alive and well and still being worked out. But the question remains: which Dickinson are we working on? Which one are we fantasizing about? The Howe / Werner / Bervin model is undeniably attractive. She’s also the one that is in fashion this sea-son. Given her increasing power, how might we keep the other Emily Dickinsons conceptually — and meaningfully — in play?

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contributors

kareem james abu-zeid is a translator, editor, teacher, graduate student, and writer based in Northern California. He is currently writing a history of psychedelic literature.

kim addonizio’s most recent book of poetry is Lucifer at the Starlite (W.W. Norton, 2009). Her new story collection, The Palace of Illu-sions, is due from Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press this year.

samiya bashir* is the author of two books of poetry, Gospel (2009) and Where the Apple Falls (2005), both from RedBone Press. She teaches creative writing at Reed College.

charles bernstein is the author of Recalculating (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Attack of the Di∞cult Poems: Essays and In-ventions (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

mark bibbins’s poem in this issue is from his third book, They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, published by Copper Canyon Press this month.

gabrielle calvocoressi* is the author of Apocalyptic Swing (2009) and The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (2005), both from Persea Books. She is the senior poetry editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

lilli carré* is the cofounder of the Eyeworks Festival of Experi-mental Animation. She has created several books of comics, most recently Heads or Tails (Fantagraphics Books, 2012). A solo exhibi-tion of her work is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago until April 15, 2014.

michael earl craig’s * most recent book of poems is Talkative-ness (Wave Books, 2014). He is a farrier and lives near Livingston, Montana.

najwan darwish* was born in Jerusalem in 1978. Since the publi-cation of his first collection in 2000, his poetry has been translated into ten languages. Nothing More to Lose (New York Review Books) will be published this month.

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gina franco* is the author of The Keepsake Storm (University of Arizona Press, 2004).

dolores hayden’s * poetry collections are Nymph, Dun, and Spin-ner (2010) and American Yard (2004), both from David Robert Books. She is also the author of nonfiction about landscape including A Field Guide to Sprawl (W.W. Norton, 2004).

rebecca hazelton is the author of Vow (Cleveland State Uni-versity Poetry Center, 2013) and Fair Copy (Ohio State University Press, 2012).

ishion hutchinson* was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His col-lection Far District (2010) was published by Peepal Tree Press. He is an assistant professor of English at Cornell University.

michael klein’s * third poetry collection is The Talking Day (Sib-ling Rivalry Press, 2013). His books of prose are The End of Being Known (2003) and Track Conditions (2003), both published by Uni-versity of Wisconsin Press.

dorothea lasky is the author of Thunderbird (2012), Black Life (2010), and AWE (2007), all from Wave Books. She is an assistant professor of poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

karen an-hwei lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008), and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Nor-ma Farber First Book Award.

sarah lindsay’s fourth book is Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). She has received the 2012 Carolyn Kizer Prize, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize.

sheryl luna’s* second collection is SEVEN (3: A Taos Press, 2013). Her first collection, Pity the Drowned Horses (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), received the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.

valzhyna mort is the author of Collected Body (2011) and Factory of Tears (2008), both published by Copper Canyon Press, and is the editor of Something Indecent: Poems Recommended by Eastern Euro-pean Poets (Red Hen Press, 2013).

christina pugh’s new book of poems is Grains of the Voice (Tri-Quarterly Books /Northwestern University Press, 2013). She teaches

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in the program for writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is the consulting editor for Poetry.

liane strauss* is the author of Leaving Eden (Salt, 2010) and Frankie, Alfredo (Donut Press, 2009). She is the head of poetry in creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London.

matthew sweeney’s most recent book of poems is Horse Music (Bloodaxe Books, 2013). A new collection, Inquisition Lane, is forth-coming from Bloodaxe in 2015.

matthew zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Sun Bear (2014) and Come On All You Ghosts (2010), both published by Copper Canyon Press.

* First appearance in Poetry.

Dedicated to Irish PoetryWe want to hear from you: wfupress@wfu.edu • 336.758.5448

AT BOOKSELLERS, OR ORDER DIRECT FROM WWW.WFUPRESS.WFU.EDU

HARRY CLIFTON THE HOLDING CENTRE: SELECTED POEMS, 1974–2004

This selection presents the thirty-year trajectory of an Irish poet who has lived and worked between Ireland and elsewhere—including Southeast Asia after the Khmer Rouge and Europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This extraordinary work has redefined what it means to be Irish in the twenty-first century.

January 2014 Paperback, $16.95

CONOR O’CALLAGHAN THE SUN KING“[S]lant, shimmering, sidelong notes are a speciality in The Sun King, O’Callaghan’s best book to date…. Exhilaratingly contemporary in its idioms, The Sun King is also reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s experiments with different metres.” Irish Times

“The most sonically alive of poets… The Sun King beats radiant gold out of the dark shards, the refuse and refusals, of life.” Tower Poetry

December 2013 Paperback, $14.95

SCHOLASTIC™ Scholastic Inc. Art © 2014 by Jon J Muth.

For activities and more, visit scholasticstoryhour.com

A poetic book of friendship, love, and celebrating the seasons!

Caldecott Honor author Jon J Muth presents twenty-six haikus about the four seasons.

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Zen Shorts Zen Ties Zen GhostsThe Three Questions

“Marvelous…A joyous addendum.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“In a word, magical.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

★

★

TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY PRESS

WINNER, 2014 WALT MCDONALD FIRST-BOOK SERIES IN POETRY

The Glad Hand of God Points BackwardsPoems

Rachel MenniesIntroduction by Robert A. Fink

Rachel Mennies looks to her familial and social history toshape a collection inhabited by the fi gures of her past. Beauti-fully crafted, these poems enjoin compassion and wit, ex-perimental and formal designs, telling “the truth/and the lies together.” This astonishing debut brings a marvelous voice to American letters.

—Robin Becker, author of Tiger Heron

$21.95 cloth | 978-0-89672-854-7

Robert A. Fink, series editor

ALSO AVAILABLE

www.ttupress.org | ttup@ttu.edu

The Eighth DayPoems Old and New

Geoffrey Hartman

$21.95 cloth | 978-0-89672-831-8

There are poems here in whose presence one can barely breathe.

—Irving Feldman, author of Collected Poems, 1954–2004

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AdriAn MAtejkAThe Big Smoke“Matejka makes a chamber opera out of the highly mythologized and often deeply misunderstood life of Jack Johnson.” —Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Apocalyptic Swing.Penguin • 128 pp. • 978-0-14-312372-9 • $18.00

2013 National Book Award Finalist

Willie PerdoMoThe eSSenTiAl hiTS of ShorTy Bon Bon“A gorgeous, historically engaged collection.”—Aracelis Girmay. From a prize-winning poet, new poems that follow a percussionist on a reimagined journey of self-discovery. Penguin • 80 pp. • 978-0-14-312523-5 • $18.00

CArl dennisAnoTher reASonIn Dennis’s newest and twelfth collection, the poems enact a drama of attempted persuasion, as the poet confers with himself, with intimates, and with strangers, if only in the hope that by defining differences more precisely one may be drawn into a genuine dialogue.Penguin • 112 pp. • 978-0-14-312522-8 • $18.00

nAthAn hoksThe nArrow CirCleHoks explores inner and outer experiences through associative lyrics and fabulist prose. Suites of pictures within the text further delineate this inward-outward pull, offering visualizations of interior voices and sketches of exterior shadows.Penguin • 96 pp. • 978-0-14-312373-6 � $18.00

National Poetry Series Winner

Ann lAuterbAChunder The SignLauterbach pursues longstanding in- quiries into how language forms and informs our understanding of the relation between empirical observa-tion and subjective response; worldly attachment and inwardness; the given and the chosen.Penguin • 160 pp. • 978-0-14-312418-4 • $22.00

PAttiAnn rogersholy heAThen rhAPSodyThe poems in Rogers’s new collection embrace and embody the forces of the Earth and the creative power of its lifeforms in all the wildness of their varieties. Penguin • 112 pp. • 978-0-14-312388-0 • $20.00

n e w f ro m P e n g u i n P o e T S

“Almost unbearably painful and poignant, Amaud Jamaul Johnson’s remarkable new book Darktown Follies walks the difficult line between historical record and lyric insight.”

— James Hoch

One of Slate’s Ten Best Poetry Books of 2013

$16.95 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-936797-39-4

“Adélia Prado’s most recent collection of poems, once more in Ellen Doré Watson’s superbly energetic and natural English, is nothing like any poetry I know in our present moment. ... She has given us a perfectly crystalline ex-voto.”

—Jean Valentine

$19.95 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-936797-30-1

www.tupelopress.org

The Academy of American Poets celebrates its 80th anniversary with a brand new poets.org

and the 18th annual national poetry month

in April.

Academy of American Poets75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901 New York, NY 10038 poets.org

eighty years of

Admission is free and open to the public.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014 • 7:00 pmLisner Auditorium, The George Washington University

730 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC 20052

Watch state champions from high schools across the country compete for the national title.

2014

The Poetry Out Loud National Finals will be webcast live at

arts.gov

Follow the finals

on Twitter at #POL14 and like us on Facebook

at Poetry Out Loud: National

Recitation Contest