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Category Archives: Poetry
Own Your Reaction
Elizabeth Hoover has a chapbook Love in the Wild in which the aestheticization of violence leaves the reader in trembling cognitive dissonance. Here is the end of “War Games” which tells the story of a rescue attempt that butts up … Continue reading
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Oneiric Oscillations
Jay Hopler Green Squall You grow to expect the pattern of statement and counter-statement, a litany of contradictions. And then the series knots upon itself. It was so loud it was so quiet we didn’t sleep we slept. We didn’t … Continue reading
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Taking Stock of Making Stock
Mijoter: Faire cuire ou bouillir lentement. Recipe I’m the one working the kitchen, making stock from chicken wing tips I’d saved in the freezer, some bouillon cubes, the picked-over carcass of last Sunday’s dinner. A gallon of spring water […] … Continue reading
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Archive Garden Potager
Louise Glück opens her forward to Green Squall by Jay Hopler with the following observation: Before poetry began pitching its tents in the library and museum, before, that is, mediated experience supplanted what came to seem the naive fantasy of … Continue reading
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Praise of Rural Life
Kenneth Rexroth gave this poem by Lu Yu the title “Evening in the Village”. I like to call it “Retirement”. Here in the mountain village Evening falls peacefully. Half tipsy, I lounge in the Doorway. The moon shines in the … Continue reading
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A balance of faculties
John Williams The Broken Landscape “Bookplate” What brain has wrought Tongue cannot show Nor what tongue meant Brain fully know. The poem continues but these first four lines make a fine epigram. And so for day 2139 21.10.2012
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Torque Variations and Matrix Manipulations
DWR first found these and tethered I keep reeling… Tautened Tongue Tension Taunted Tongue Tension (Tautened Tongue) Tension Tautened (Tongue Tension) Haunted by the taunting… And so for day 2133 15.10.2012
A burn deeper than a bonfire
On the afterlife of trees First the note: ‘La Quercia del Tasso’ or ‘Tasso’s Oak’ on Janiculum (Gianicolo) hill, Rome, is said to have been a place of rest and contemplation for Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso in the weeks before … Continue reading
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Repetition Inversion Inversion Repetition
Jay Hopler in “The Coast Road”, the last poem in The Abridged History of Rain, invites us to pay attention: It’s not what one listens to that matters, But what one listens for— I listen for repetition. I listen for … Continue reading
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This nor This is not That and not I
Amazing syntactic twist unfolds round a series of negations marking transitoriness and ending with endurance of the self… This is not the moon, Nor is this the spring, Of other springs, And I alone Am still the same Translated by … Continue reading
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