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Category Archives: Poetry
A Path to Paths
idolize, idealize it’s done in imagining it, poetry, can suffer we are not saved by appeal to the plural there is still a sense of an organism at play, an ecology at work I hope never to idealize poetry — … Continue reading
Posted in Booklore, Poetry
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Assembled Members of a Set
Some notations on “Final Notations” from An Atlas of the Difficult World by Adrienne Rich What is its meaning? Try memorizing the first stanza. Be mindful of what gets laid down quickly and where the memory catches. It’s itself. It … Continue reading
Questioning Legacy
Richard Howard commands us to pay attention to a poetic voice that would argue that all ties to the past are severed. We run over title and epigraph and find opening stanzas set off by indentation on left and right. … Continue reading
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Recognition Scenes
This is how it begins The image/ the pawnees in their earth-lodge villages, the clear image of teton sioux, wild fickle people the chronicler says, This is how it ends in our desires, our desires, mirages, mirrors, that are theirs, hard- … Continue reading
The Players
The game is more than just a game and nothing but a game. Richard Howard in Quantities begins “The Old Men Playing Boccie on Leroy Street” A sense of Fall without the trees That make their rot so decorous, And … Continue reading
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Rebar Feathers
from “Fletched” in Phil Hall. The Small Nouns Crying Faith A flower no I mean one who unplucked flows the o as in holy not ouch I adore how in reading this line the mind is forced back by the … Continue reading
Abed
Almost ringing the changes of the puer aeternus theme, Roo Borson concludes a prose poem “Summer” from The Whole Night, Coming Home with an image that brushes up against melancholy but refreshes the mind with its sparkling originality. No matter … Continue reading
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Haruspical
Poetry is a sort of divination. This is an old and respectable trope. One that plays in the background of “Wabakimi Lake” (in Breaker). Sue Sinclair invites the addressee to be both the subject and object of scrutiny. The twisting … Continue reading
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Least Terms
There erupts a passage from Lisa Robertson “The Fountain Transcript” Nevertheless, flow in itself, with its fatal grandeur, does not interest us: we prefer to describe obstacles to flow, little impediments, affect-mechanisms, miniaturizations of subliminity. as I am contemplating poems … Continue reading
New Senses Old Work
Each line is a delicate tissue. “The house is each day more fragile. We suffer / And laugh and swim. We go” Lucretius meets Cage. The names release birds and animals into wild chance. Fruit trees don’t stop changing either … Continue reading
Posted in Perception, Poetry
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