November 2015 FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE. volume ccvii number 2

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1 November 2015 FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume ccvii number 2

2 CONTENTS November 2015 POEMS zack strait 111 Blaze kathleen ossip 114 Old Strange Book ed roberson 118 May I Ask Rosetta Stone Serious Study of Love Song ( from the British Museum) Aunt Haint a.e. stallings 124 The Barnacle john beer 125 By and By emilia phillips 128 Dream of the Phone Booth charles harper webb 129 Swept Away carol frost 132 Alias City javier zamora 133 The Pier of La Herradura How I Learned to Walk Looking at a Coyote shane mccrae 136 Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man s Face kazim ali 137 The Earthquake Days drew gardner 140 Sheep to Sweater eisder mosquera 142 The Angelfish Greet Odysseus patrick rosal 143 An Instance of an Island paula cunningham 146 At St. Malachy s Church sina queyras 147 The Couriers Cut marianne boruch 150 Water at Night vona groarke 152 On Seeing Charlotte Brontë s Underwear with my Daughter in Haworth

3 les murray 154 Self and Dream Self kate farrell 156 Metaphysics brenda shaughnessy 157 McQueen Is Dead. Long Live McQueen. alan ramón clinton 164 Optical Unconscious (1) Optical Unconscious (2) hai-dang phan 166 My Father s Norton Introduction to Literature, Third Edition (1981) camonghne felix 168 The Therapist Asks 3 lisa grove 169 In the Mouth of a Terrible, Toothless God A Lullaby, for the Fir Tree Growing in My Left Lung meghan o rourke 172 The Night Where You No Longer Live marcus wicker 174 Taking Aim at a Macy s Changing Room Mirror, I Blame Television THE LIVES OF FRANK LIMA garrett caples 177 Introduction frank lima 184 Epicedium to Potter s Field Incidents of Travel in Poetry Byron Juarez Heckyll & Jeckyll Felonies and Arias of the Heart Bright Blue Self-Portrait COMMENT david wheatley 197 So Much Better Than Most Things Written on Purpose contributors 209

4 Editor Art Director Managing Editor Assistant Editor Editorial Assistant Consulting Editor Design don share fred sasaki sarah dodson lindsay garbutt holly amos christina pugh alexander knowlton cover art by laura park aperture, 2015 POETRYMAGAZINE.ORG a publication of the POETRY FOUNDATION printed by cadmus professional communications, us Poetry November 2015 Volume 207 Number 2 Poetry (issn: ) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation. Address editorial correspondence to 61 W. Superior St., Chicago, IL Individual subscription rates: $35.00 per year domestic; $47.00 per year foreign. Library / institutional subscription rates: $38.00 per year domestic; $50.00 per year foreign. Single copies $3.75, plus $1.75 postage, for current issue; $4.25, plus $1.75 postage, for back issues. Address new subscriptions, renewals, and related correspondence to Poetry, PO Box , Palm Coast, FL or call Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing o ces. postmaster: Send address changes to Poetry, PO Box , Palm Coast, FL All rights reserved. Copyright 2015 by the Poetry Foundation. Double issues cover two months but bear only one number. Volumes that include double issues comprise numbers 1 through 5. Please visit poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/submissions for submission guidelines and to access the magazine s online submission system. Available in braille from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Available on microfilm and microfiche through National Archive Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, MI. Digital archive available at JSTOR.org. Distributed to bookstores by Ingram Periodicals, Media Solutions, Ubiquity Distributors, and Central Books in the UK.

5 POEMS

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7 zack strait Blaze we were riding out to an abandoned farmhouse on his pearl black Triumph deaf to the sound of bleating sheep that was when he told me it was the same model James Dean had swapped for three days after they d finished filming East of Eden I tried to tell him that was cool but he didn t act like he d heard me so I hugged him tight and set my head on his shoulder and watched how the yellow moon was shifting behind the pines like the face of a jailbird he d told me before that his wife knew he didn t swing her way but she was keeping quiet about it for their kid s sake we rumbled into the dry grass and started cutting through the cornstalks into a big clearing where he kicked the bike stand and told me to get off ZACK STRAIT 111

8 he tossed his chrome aviators and then we started our hike to the farmhouse which was sagging in the field opposite of us we were quiet on the way like a couple of thieves about to rob someone blind I stood back as he tore a warped door off the barn and flung it into the gravel inside the air was dusty and thick and the moon was still with us cocked behind a streaked window like we d traded places and now we were the jailbirds serving a lifetime sentence without parole John pulled off his steel-toe boots and told me to wait for him up in the hayloft I left my loafers there and climbed a wood ladder until I was looking into the eyes of a great horned owl he kept shaking his head like he couldn t believe what was about to happen I was going to be John s first 112O POETRY

9 but while I was gathering the wet straw I smelled smoke and slid back down the ladder that was when I saw the fire licking the crossbeams and ran outside John was passing through the wheat like a final judgment his figure was muscled with flame and I kept silent as he reached for a head of grain and burned it to the ground ZACK STRAIT 113

10 kathleen ossip Old Strange Book In the story of my life there is a field filled with chicory, daisies, and mayflowers. It s the field behind my childhood house. In summer, I used to spend hours lying in it looking at clouds before my mother brought us to the town pool where I spent some more hours swimming. In the other seasons I went to school. In the school there was a library. In the story of my life there is a book. The book was bound in rough green cloth. Its glossy pages smelled oddly like puke. The book told the story of two children, Johnnie and Jill, I think. They got lost in a deep forest, drawn in thick dark ink. They were brother-and-sister orphans. They met fantastical creatures. One was the goddess of spring, or was that in Botticelli s picture that I saw in the same library in a book of art history for kids, old European art of course. The other kinds they did not want us to know about. The picture was magic and so was Johnnie and Jill though not a children s classic. 114O POETRY

11 I don t really remember the title. In the book the goddess of spring rescues the children in trouble and then I can t remember a thing. I m sure there was a villain in the book, probably a woman, who practiced dark arts on a dark hill, so evil she wasn t human. In the story of my life there is a hill that tamely rises above the field. We sledded there in winter. In spring our bikes wheeled down the hill dangerously. I walked on the hill this summer tamely, carefully, slowly, alongside my mother. It isn t hard to say what had brought us there. We were old and middle-aged in the knife-like summer air. Slowly and tamely we walked and I remembered the book. It was called Julie and John? I wanted another look. So what was the title? And was it an allegory? A Catholic one? (It was a Catholic school.) That would ruin the story. KATHLEEN OSSIP 115

12 A story is only good if it s made up but convinces you it s true. Even better if one of the characters is someone who could be you. How else do you know who you are? I once asked an old strange friend: You only know you re the person who s with the people you love, in the end. From the hill I saw the house. I imagined myself on the stair clutching the wrought-iron rail, a beanie on my bright hair. On the hill I thought of the book. That old strange book would save me. But Google was not my friend or maybe I was crazy. Years had passed since I read the book. My hair was darker, my body had opened to make a person, my cheekbones were starker. Still I kept hold of the book like a talisman or a bluff. Any book I d seen that was like it was not like it enough. Research didn t help and memory is no good. Longing was all I could do and making up as much as I could. 116O POETRY

13 Many books have I read, many people loved. They mattered and mattered and mattered. I tried but never found the book. The field is where I ll be scattered. KATHLEEN OSSIP 117

14 ed roberson May I Ask May I ask you who your grandmother died Her blackness you pretended we d assume a servant s in the photograph May I ask did she die herself? I know you all light under an umbrella don t tan and she could be seen as she had been made too dark for what the son do. I saw her years ago after she died And again today in the market I asked her I had to know if she was who I knew... Only two things you really has to tha s to stay black and die. Black, yes, but if black leads some to pretend that you have died except you re black and alive who are you? She is as hundreds of years old as the stories of the lies of grandmothers in the cellar O POETRY

15 May I ask who your grandmother herself? died if she died ED ROBERSON 119

16 Rosetta Stone Serious Study of Love Song ( from the British Museum) To Iretha A textbook photograph most likely led me to think the Rosetta Stone the size of a library s old Webster s Third Edition or two loaves of bread on a side board, but here it stands, three tongues, or one mind that can say three ways we say the one thing, the breaths and sights of each way in rock, a milestone in intangibles between them. Reflected light from outside through the entrance, duplicating on the glass case the door image that the stone itself is opens when you walk around behind it exhibit the inhibition of letters, and I see you, not a translation, step through from beyond all description into the calling of flesh in black skin: beauty. Beauty. Beauty. 120O POETRY

17 Aunt Haint She would post herself in the way in lines headed to transfer stops, to change, or haunt intersections with four way full scarecrow indecision, stop on the corners of streets, and in the aisles of buses, preaching only that which has never left these crossings for road, for choice the angry fear. She seats at the feasts Thanksgiving, any holiday, any family place setting the hunger of others satisfaction for herself, she seeks it said this is what she deserves, if only of herself. What she thinks she thinks needs to be said whatever anyone else thinks to be honest. So there she sings from that part of the door she s never got through, the eye which requires it all taken off down all blown away to get through to that still naked-ness of clear again even if she s not still, the voice comes through that if we could listen as she is equally raw hear with meat and gut below the skin, beyond the last violence, to the silence just before the bone if we could still hear there we d hear ED ROBERSON 121

18 What hand can you offer one wanting just to get even for what it doesn t know what, 2 just to take out what it feels on someone else to hurt because it can t get at where it hurts itself to have to see to clear like a movie fakes done seeing sharper than thought can cut to it; what hand can you offer one that doesn t know even as a balance any other than more as my half and who counts itself that much more and that more proofless multiple unanswerably human hurts because it can t figure out a figure to answer how it wants so count doesn t count higher than want and want also falls short enough to take someone down for it but there is no size for another to be cut down to but none but death this is so frustrating 122O POETRY

19 You see me get the hell away from her don t you quick as I can and I bein nice she act all girlfriend but that bitch dangerous she pull so much rotten shit on peoples she due to get her ass killed anytime and I don t tend to be nowhere near round 3 I ain t getting cut down just for standin next to her I ain t all that innocent but I don t be lookin for nothing I don t deserve ED ROBERSON 123

20 a.e. stallings The Barnacle The barnacle is rather odd It s not related to the clam Or limpet. It s an arthropod, Though one that doesn t give a damn. Cousin to the crab and shrimp, When larval, it can twitch and swim, And make decisions tiny imp That flits according to its whim. Once grown, with nothing more to prove It hunkers down, and will remain Stuck fast. And once it does not move, Has no more purpose for a brain. Its one boast is, it will not budge, Cemented where it chanced to sink, Sclerotic, stubborn as a grudge. Settled, it does not need to think. 124O POETRY

21 john beer By and By Now the passenger pigeons flock across the sky, Plunging the Central Valley grasshopper into darkness As the Snake River sucker pushes upstream And the golden toad relaxes. A passing skiff Startles a lone gravenche in Switzerland, Just as a pair of blue pike swerve To avoid an anchor. The harelip sucker Stays on course. A phantom shiner Might have swerved to snap up a three-tooth caddisfly, Or even Blackburn s weevil, but it s hard to tell Why the white-winged sandpiper wheels At the distant warble of a black-footed parakeet. Gould s emerald has a tiny, ferocious heart. Domed Mauritius tortoises are clannish, Often clashing with saddle-backed Mauritius tortoises, Though the saddle-backed Rodrigues tortoise Enjoys friendly relations with the domed Rodrigues tortoise. The Santa Fe Island tortoise keeps to itself, brooding Over its sufferings. The Japanese wolf sniffs the air. The Tasmanian wolf bursts into a sprint, The Arabian ostrich could outpace a sprinting bicyclist, And the legs of the sprinting red gazelle blur beneath it, Like the rapidly beating wings of the Kosrae crake. The Kosrae starling is nesting. In one tree The Cascade funnel-web spider lays a trap, While in another, the American chestnut moth Sleeps fitfully. The dodo is too trusting. The laughing owl can be heard across the island. The roar of the Caspian tiger resounds in a canyon. Children shudder at the sound of the Bombay lion. But not even the Caribbean monk seal Hears the Caribbean monk seal mite silently make Its home in the manner of the passenger pigeon mite, Burrowing into the ear canal. The warm river water JOHN BEER 125

22 Through which the Durango shiner darts Reflects a spectacled cormorant. On drafts of air A dusky seaside sparrow rises. Its shadow falls On a school of stumptooth minnows. The sunlight Barely filters down to a Bodensee-kilch, But a red-headed green macaw glimmers. The Kona grosbeak filches fruit from volcanoes Sloping down to the shore where Galápagos damsels Frolic and spawn. The bezoule makes a rare Appearance. Heath hens gather by the pond. Only when the North Island giant moa starts to wonder About what happened to the South Island giant moa Does the upland moa give any thought To the whereabouts of the eastern moa. Meanwhile, The coastal moa seems to have gone off After the heavy-footed moa, which follows In its turn the tracks of the crested moa, Wandering the islands looking for Mantell s moa. None of them have seen a bush moa in a while. Even as the quagga poses for its photograph, The St. Croix racer is slithering out of the frame In eager pursuit of a big-eared hopping mouse. This may be the moment the Queen of Sheba s gazelle Takes its leave, along with the Atlas bear, The Palestinian painted frog, and several others. The aurochs left long ago. The lapping waves Echo the strokes of the sea mink, but like The Japanese river otter, it s nowhere To be seen. What will the confused moth do? The same as Darwin s rice rat. Years go by, And the Martinique macaw flies through none of them. Melville might have encountered a Nuka Hiva monarch, But Nabokov never pinned a Xerces blue. 126O POETRY

23 Cloned, the Pyrenean ibex lived A few seconds more. The paradise parrot Sported the spectrum on its plumage. Bluebucks Only looked blue while alive. The Miller s rail Survives in a painting. Labrador ducks ate mussels. The crescent nail-tail wallaby once was common. The thylacine appeared four million years ago. Rats killed off the mysterious starling. JOHN BEER 127

24 emilia phillips Dream of the Phone Booth My story s told in the mis-dial s hesitance & anonyms of crank calls, in the wires electric elegy & glass expanded by the moth flicker of filament. I call a past that believes I m dead. On the concrete here, you can see where I stood in rust, lashed to the grid. On the corner of Pine & Idlewood, I ve seen a virgin on her knees before the angel of a streetlight & Moses stealing the Times to build a fire. I ve seen the city fly right through a memory & not break its neck. But the street still needs a shrine, so return my ringing heart & no one to answer it, a traveler whose only destination is waywardness. Forgive us our apologies, the bees in our bells, the receiver s grease, days horizoned into words. If we stand monument to anything, it s that only some voices belong to men. 128O POETRY

25 charles harper webb Swept Away Selvakumar had waked too often to the shouts of dogs come home too many times to an empty chicken coop, stray feathers where dinner was supposed to roost. Finding two dogs in his house one night, he slammed his door to trap them, gathered stones and the flinging done gibbeted the bodies from a tree. A week later, he woke in darkness, feeling himself swept down a black, stinking hole the way in Kansas City, Missouri, Inspector Daniel Collins, smacked by a surge of sewer-water, slipped from his safety line and clattered down a 28-inch pipe dark as the grave it seemed about to be. Waking from sound sleep that morning, wolfing a breakfast of high-fiber toast and raisin bran, Dan never dreamed a real nightmare would swallow him. Selvakumar squeezed by his nightmare screamed. One ear was deaf; both hands were numb; his legs, too weak to hold his weight, tongue lolling like a dead fish in his mouth the way Dan s did as liquid filth shoved his head under, while first thrashing and battering, then not he rolled/banged/slithered through earth s bowels in darkness worse CHARLES HARPER WEBB 129

26 than what seized Irmgard Holm s left eye when, after cataract surgery, she groped for eye drops in the night, grabbed a Super Glue tube, and sealed her lid tight. Doctors took Selvakumar s cash, and shook their heads. A village healer diagnosed, The dogs cursed you. To break the curse, friends caught a stray, named her Selvi Repentance wrapped her in an orange sari, and hung a purple garland on her neck. Selvakumar all in white, but for a purple garland like his bride s felt his dead legs quiver as she edged toward him. Even as he pledged eternal love, he planned to wed a woman when his health returned. Unlike a two-legged wife, though, Selvi didn t hound him about the marital act, didn t demand a better sari or a bigger home, or nag as he grew more helpless every day. Easy to laugh, invoking Brad & Angelina, Pyramus & Thisbe. Still, on the night Selvakumar found himself rushing again down the dark hole, who can say that Selvi didn t guide him as Irmgard s husband led her to the doctor who dissolved the glue and saved her eye as Daniel s cries led rescuers to him, twelve feet underground, two miles from where he began 130O POETRY

27 as the son of Marjorie Potts Gaffrey (dead in her sleep at 99), by sprinkling his mother s ashes in her favorite flower pot, led Marjorie to wake as an African violet, sun bright on her leaves as it was in Daniel s and Irmgard s eyes, the dew of morning like the feel, as Selvakumar lay dying in his bed, of Selvi s tongue. CHARLES HARPER WEBB 131

28 carol frost Alias City They were travelers, plotting river courses, writing the genesis of unknown people, fugitives with a revolver in one hand, reins in another, merchants among the olive trees, euphorbias, mimosas, emissaries, deserters. Some knew the native tongues; they called themselves by new names in the eastern twilight, different parts of their soul never having learned to live together. Skies burned. Dust covered the palms and minarets as they arrived by the incandescent shore of our city, each with his own little dreams and disasters. Some remained, never to be heard of again. Some left with caravans, wearing native dress ephemerids. Where are they? What are they used to? The only preserved interview concerning an artist and explorer. Did he ever speak of his friends in X? Never. The only thing he liked in X was his sister. But did you know that he painted? Oh yes! some fine things: stemware, a series of watercolors of shoebills and Abdim s stork. 132O POETRY

29 javier zamora The Pier of La Herradura When I sleep I see a child hidden between the legs of a scarred man, their sunburnt backs breathe cold air, the child faces me and the pier s roof swallows the moon cut by the clouds behind them. Sometimes, they re on the same roof wearing handkerchiefs and uniformed men surround them. I mistake bullet casings for cormorant beaks diving till water churns the color of sunsets, stained barnacles line the pier and I can t see who s facedown on boats lulled by crimson ripples. Once, I heard the man alive and still on the roof say today for you, tomorrow for me. There s a village where men train cormorants to fish: rope-end tied to sterns, another to necks, so their beaks won t swallow the fish they catch. My father is one of those birds. He s the scarred man. JAVIER ZAMORA 133

30 How I Learned to Walk Calláte. Don t say it out loud: the color of his hair, the sour odor of his skin, the way they say his stomach rose when he slept. I have done nothing, said nothing. I piss in the corner of the room, the outhouse is far, I think orange blossoms call me to eat them. I fling rocks at bats hanging midway up almond trees. I ve skinned lizards. I ve been bored. It s like that time I told my friend Luz to rub her lice against my hair. I wanted to wear a plastic bag, to smell of gasoline, to shave my hair, to feel something like his hands on my head. When I clutch pillows, I think of him. If he sleeps facedown like I do. If he can tie strings to the backs of dragonflies. I ve heard of how I used to run to him. His hair still smelling of fish, gasoline, and seaweed. It s how I learned to walk they say. Calláte. If I step out this door, I want to know nothing will take me. Not the van he ran to. Not the man he paid to take him. Mamá Pati was asleep when he left. People say somehow I walked across our cornfield at dawn, a few steps behind. I must have seen him get in that van. I was two. I sat behind a ceiba tree, waiting. No one could find me. 134O POETRY

31 Looking at a Coyote among thirty dusty men the only wet thing the mouth of the coyote is a mini zoo we are from many countries in which there are many coyotes 500 bucks and we re off think about it is the shortest verse of a corrido a gila monster and a coyote are one a gila monster and a coyote and a gringo are one strewn bottles melt dirt the coyote s tongue fills them we don t know which to swat the coyote or the froth the mosquitoes or the flies gringos why do you see us illegal don t you think we are the workers around you we speak different accents yours included and we know también the coyote is suspect of what we say when the coyote hears helicopters in Nike shoes he trots Arizona Nogales whores close their doors the coyote trots Arizona in Nike shoes the desert is still the coyote must be tired in his shadow he sees searchlights it s day all night it s dusting and it s going to dust the coyote rests under yuccas JAVIER ZAMORA 135

32 shane mccrae Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man s Face Before it disappears on the sand his long white beard before it disappears The face of the man in the waves I ask her does she see it ask her does The old man in the waves as the waves crest she see it does she see the old man his White his face crumbling face it looks as old as he s as old as The ocean looks and for a moment almost looks His face like it s all the way him As never such old skin looks my / Daughter age four She thinks it might he might be real she shouts Hello And after there s no answer answers No 136O POETRY

33 kazim ali The Earthquake Days In the earthquake days I could not hear you over the din or it might have been the dinner bell but that s odd because I m usually the one cooking if not dinner then a plan to build new fault lines through the dangerous valley. I can t give you an answer right now because I m late for my resurrection, the one where I step into my angel offices and fuck the sun senseless. That eclipse last week? Because of me. You re welcome. The postman rattles up with your counter offer and I m off to a yoga class avoiding your call yes like the plague because son you can read in the dark and I have no hiding place left. You know me too well and you know it. We walk hand in hand down the hill into the Castro avoiding the nudist protest not because we are afraid but because we already know all about this city, its engineered foundations, the earthquake-proofed buildings, the sea walls. No tempest will catch us unaware while we claim our share of the province of penumbral affections. You have no reason to trust me but I swear I lie down in this metal box as it thunders and looks KAZIM ALI 137

34 inside my brain. I am terrified nothing is wrong because otherwise how will I rewrite the maps unmoored a deep sea a moor a cosmonaut Who needs saving more than the one who forgot how the lazy cartographer mislabeled his birthplace as Loss? Riding the bus out to the end of the lines and back I collect trash for art, oil spill, spent forest, the mind is at work and everything is at stake. I demand statehood for my states of mind, senators for my failure, my disappointment, the slander and my brain unmapped reveals no explanation for danger the ground untamed. I make paintings of nothing and stand before them like mirrors. I recently became a man but I do not want to let go of my weakness, instead want to meet God in heaven and in long psychotropic odes have Him send me again digging in the dirt to unleash tantric animal governors to lay down the orgasmic law twice skewered and miserable in the old photographs, miserable in my body, huddled next to my mother, recently permed and aglow so unaware of what is about to hit her. I am the answer to Bhanu s question: Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother? and so sick I considered that sickness could bring us closer and Shahid and Allen in heaven 138O POETRY

35 slap me silly because they want me to know that this world is worth its trembling. At the next table over a mother tries to reconcile her bickering sons. I have no brother but the one I invent has always got my back, he drowns out the mullahs so my mother can hear me finally. In a different book Jesus never suffered, never was flogged or died went whole into heaven without passion. Shall I then deny myself passport through the stark places unsalvageable, imagine it, the Mother of Sorrows did never grieve in the new season trees smell of semen and the tectonic plates make their latest explosive move: to transubstantiate my claim by unveiling this city down to its stone. Everyone I know wants to douse the hungry flames, flee the endless aftershocks, unravel every vexing question. You owe me this witness. I owe you the fire. KAZIM ALI 139

36 drew gardner Sheep to Sweater Considering the frequency with which I take people s words out of context, lie through my teeth and smear anyone who doesn t hew to my philosophy of division and contempt, I d prefer my candidate of choice to stay on the high road, but there s a certain element of fighting fire with dilemmas, not just for me, but for any candidate. Is it more important to lose honorably, or to get into the gutter with your own particularity when so much is the answer? I love the pumpkin idea. I will definitely use that and I also plan on making the kielbasa launcher. I already have a guacamole rifle and it s the same thing, I just need to figure out how to do it. If you have ideas for that please help. Also on the splitting heads thing they have that hydraulic wrench that rips the brain chunks out of the head you can do that so much easier just get the fishing line attached to the fragments and then fill a two to three liter soda bottle with sand and throw it in the opposite direction your life is going. To see the results of this oscillatory combustion phenomenon between the acoustics of the cavity and the pyrolysis of the propellants which were used in irreproducible ignition 140O POETRY

37 which I never liked much anyway. I couldn t decipher myself. Too bad. I have typed out some abbreviated remains where my old life used to be, but I m still living in them as if they were a book. I spent the afternoon reveling and wondering what I need to do to get my own sheep. I saw sheep herding and shearing, admired the baby lambs, and followed the from sheep to sweater interpretive trail. DREW GARDNER 141

38 eisder mosquera The Angelfish Greet Odysseus Angelfish perturb the area around pink gauze, are the details of a threaded diamond string and its fake catachrestic applause. Like that of the angelheaded beast spreading its wings, as if to swim under the light of the glowworm and hyacinth, the fish are oratory and not. The pulchritude of bombazine on a shattering geoidal mid-afternoon, dribbling from sea rock to splint, the wing tips are hardly bleak accoutrements, their own swinging by the bay of a chest and a previous rock. Here we are stranded, pelagic with clot, and the fish burble with oratory and I kind of like them a lot. 142O POETRY

39 patrick rosal An Instance of an Island One way to erase an island is to invent a second island absolved of all the sounds the first one ever made. We don t know who concocted this one, where the triggerfish and clowns fade to inky neon dashes under a fisherman s skiff. A few plastic pontoons knock around makeshift slips. Dusk coaxes from the shore the small, dull chime of a spoon against a pot. And TV voices flash slow across a cliff where two pink lovers in matching swimwear kiss their glasses at the edge of a blue pool built just low enough into the hill so the couple can gaze into the sea and think of infinity. Many, many years ago, a great emperor wiggled his finger and commanded his army to corral all the lepers in his domain then pack them into a sailing ship to be delivered to the missions on this cluster of verdant volcanic rock. The emperor s orders to his captain were clear: if the monks refused the ship s freight, the skipper was to simply dump the whole sick cargo far from any shore. Other incurables followed in lots over time, or trickled in, hiding from nearby tribes, or banished from other lands to live among these lush slopes of mahogany, papaya, and weeds. Two women, Filomena and Josefa, arrived within days of one another. By then, each had lost most their toes, though they had ten full fingers between them, each woman with one hand still intact. No one is sure how it began, but once a week the pair would knock on the door of the scowling Madre Clementina to borrow the hospital s only guitar, carved from jackfruit and cracked PATRICK ROSAL 143

40 144O POETRY pretty bad along the back. To these women no big deal, for Filomena once transcribed the early moonlight serenades of the horny friars in the Royal South for the brats of an Andalusian duke. Josefa was the daughter of a carpenter, a maker of tables to be exact. She learned to play a harana s tremulous melodies on her mother s bandurria at the age of three. The pair of outcasts would stifle laughs, thrilled to earn the crusty nun s grudging Yes, then amble out to low tide and find a flat rock to share so they could prop the old guitar on both their laps, the one bad wrist of each woman unwrapped to their stumps, pulled for now behind their backs as they looked past the bay toward the violent waters that first carried them here. And they jammed. Filomena with the five deft hammers of her left and Josefa with her right, thick-muscled both blue-veined and furious, scrubbing from the instrument all those wicked rhythms from Castile to Nowhere on a fragile scrap of furniture that could barely hold its tune. They sat shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh, their good hands brushing from time to time. What they couldn t remember, they made up, and everything they made up disappeared over the lagoon and over the ocean, every note in every run, every lie and desire, every nick and crack in the jackfruit, the fat harmonics plucked from the old nun s grunts, six taut strands of gut whose chords skimmed the water like night locusts in bursts of low clouds and which bore everything in front of them and behind, the brine of the women s necks mixed with the salt of the lagoon, the cliffs, the spoons, the bright

41 nimbus of the West dipping like a noose, the future of pontoons and fake tits, the history of nifty crowns pried loose of their jewels, the jiggle of a little finger gone still. One way to erase an island is to invent the waters that surround it. You can name the waters that will turn all the sounds the island makes into salt. It will teach you to listen to everything you love disappear... or you can invent a song so big it will hold the entire ocean. Josefa and Filomena rocked in the dark, hip to hip, joined by that third body of wood, which made sure there was nothing left in the unbroken world to possibly make them whole. PATRICK ROSAL 145

42 paula cunningham At St. Malachy s Church i.m. Marty Crickard I came to light a candle for a friend but Jesus had a really bad mustache and those were only pinpricks in his palms so I passed on. I came to light a candle for a friend but Joseph s hands were manicured and soft as Fairy Liquid hands I could not light one there so I passed on. In the corner was a fellow with a cowled robe and a tonsure like a saucer he palmed a young and curly blonde Adonis so I passed on then to Benoît-Joseph Labre, a tattered man whose wide eyes blazed, he looked quite mad, had beggar s hands, I liked him. I lit two dozen candles, didn t pay, and nicked this book on him before I left. I did all this in honor of my matchless absent friend, whose honest calloused workman s hands maintained the half of Belfast, and nothing s been the same since he passed on. 146O POETRY

43 sina queyras The Couriers Words from a leaf on the shell of a snail? Tendency as reciprocity etched in shale. Cider vinegar wrapped in sealskin? Accept it, so little is genuine. A box on a meteor compelled by earth? Lies, emptiness, grief: it s not a first. Frost on the dock at Penetanguishene? Tears from Lake Huron, Erie, and Michigan. Not a moment to yourself? Don t let love put you on a shelf. A preponderance of errors? The soft one sucks her rivers. Love, love, needs no reason. Yes, yes, yes, is my season. SINA QUEYRAS 147

44 Cut It wasn t a man That knocked me down With the thrill of a slice Of my will. She was mannish, Chilled, flung Her will across Mine then laughed At my shock, when she Gripped my neck while Lingering over a request For the evening meal. Later I sliced a tomato Close to my wrist. The door was open. She had warned me: Never shut it against Her. Otherwise I was free to come And go. Maybe she was Right: I was zero To the bone. Meanwhile, I had left the hose In the pond. The goldfish Cowered in the reeds. Whose side were they on? I am ill, I thought, Slogging across 148O POETRY

45 Soggy green. If I bow any lower I will be looking up At moss. SINA QUEYRAS 149

46 marianne boruch Water at Night Not that I understand things. Angels don t walk toward the ship, old engraving where moon throws a river of light, how angels would walk the ocean if they wanted to walk. They don t. They hover. A lot of space between them and what shines like waves. Which can t be a choice, for angels or the engraver who was in fact Gustave Doré after sleeping off the ancient mariner Coleridge left behind under guilt and regret and an albatross s weight. Which isn t much, but they are big animals, four feet across counting the wind involved and rain. Doré waking to a room not really of wings. I guess a stirring, something in the black expanse he hoped to razor into the copper plate no, a graver, not a razor at all. Beauty does terrify, a bare nothing but stop. As in angels. Abrupt. Still, to cut them their flight on metal takes a while. His hands stiff, Doré under a deadline no doubt like the small endlessly later rest of us do what we do and do until it s not what we do. Nevertheless, angels. Why did they keep coming, one by one radiant dark of a mind paused to this most desolate given: water at night. That it floods a future not 150O POETRY

47 even in the picture. MARIANNE BORUCH 151

48 vona groarke On Seeing Charlotte Brontë s Underwear with my Daughter in Haworth Are they real? We have pages of kitchen utensils and books and candlesticks and nibs, but the charcoal pencil and new sketchpad are squat as aubergines in her hands in front of this display. With bad weather forecast and light silting up in cramped windows, we are the only visitors. The year settles in a corner of the room, has removed its white gloves, tip by tip, and set to one side its summer purse of bibelots and sheen. Half-term of her final year, we are sightseers intent on moors. In the morning, her windcheater and red wellies will bestow the dust of summer festivals upon sullen, wind-soaked sheep. We will park, and walk ourselves into the final, cutting rain between pages of her favorite book. She wants to go all the way to Top Withens, or the house they say must have been Top Withens, given its loneliness and set. But now is artifacts and souvenirs: a perfume with too much musk in it, a jar of damson jam which we probably won t open until past its sell-by date. We are buying the word damson. And we are buying time. Are they real? she asks me, and I watch her reckon the distance between what should and should never be seen. We have fallen short. She draws, and what she draws is rain falling slant inside the bedroom; the bed as a box of leaves and stones and, within the display case, she hangs from the clothes rail, little moons. On the mannequin, water lilies stand in for morning dress, and the backdrop is marbled in what looks to me like veins and arteries. But when I flick through the sketchpad in the B&B, all the pages, what is left of them, are clean. 152O POETRY

49 Next day, she leaves it in the car. When she moves away, she will leave it again, a sketchpad with no name on it and only the faintest traces of where she made skies of darned linen, and unfastened every stitch. VONA GROARKE 153

50 les murray Self and Dream Self Routines of decaying time fade, and your waking life gets laborious as science. You huddle in, becoming the deathless younger self who will survive your dreams and vanish in surviving. Dream brings on its story at the pace of drift in twilight, sunless color, its settings are believed, a library of wood shingles, plain mythic furniture vivid drone of talk, yet few loves return: trysts seem unkeepable. Urgencies from your time join with the browner suits walking those arcades with you but then you are apart, aghast, beside the numberless defiling down steep fence into an imminence as in the ancient burrow you, with an ever-changing cast, survive deciding episodes till you are dismissed 154O POETRY

51 and a restart of tense summons your waking size out through shreds of story. LES MURRAY 155

52 kate farrell Metaphysics For a while after he died my father didn t seem to discern dream visitors, but I was amazed nonetheless to witness his swift and serene rejuvenation. From time to time I d find him dining outdoors in beautiful locales, a multicolored grain on his plate I d never seen elsewhere. Yes, laughed the server, it s a staple here; a sort of national dish, I guess, like potatoes in Ireland, pasta in Italy, couscous in Morocco, rice in Japan or Madagascar. We can t get enough of it, and it s remarkably nutritious. What s it called? I asked. She replied, metaphysics. 156O POETRY

53 brenda shaughnessy McQueen Is Dead. Long Live McQueen. There were seven colors of mourning, one was lilac. That kind of blossom always has its crowd, fanned out, surrounded by crushing likeness, smell of itself. Fabric has to breathe, at least 2%, like skin. A little milkfat, elastane even in the gravest print. Not knowing how to grieve can poison like a directionless dart. And although fabric has been known to swirl and clasp, be clasped without mother there s only art. To hug the body: a swath, anathema, magical, seventies lace and spacedust, all too far gone to truly love. But to twist it, to learn to hate-want. To sway, tear, burrow, be borrowed, everybody s animal. To float like water seeking its own, stampede like buffalo, seeking its hide. BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY 157

54 Face painted on torso on horsehair on chesty silk it s a deathmask for the stigmata slash of the model s body. I don t think I understand what studying is. I listen, I read, I remember, I absorb. I let myself be moved and changed. Is that studying? Never five-fingered, you never use them all, gloves will be like hooves, split-footed, hand-stitched. When concept perceived a womanly gist, let s say, or a curve of mind is more than itself (surpassing, all maw) I make it part of me. I take it in, drink a corrosive. I let it overtake me, change everything it can, lip to tip to rim. My eyes just drink the fabric that covers each surface of this world. Suck up the plastic through a polished straw. 158O POETRY

55 Everything s inspiration: trees reflected in windows on buildings, distorted buses endless frames, all too glass, so much lens, textures so tall, and once you start to see things this way, vision s a performance, shocking and true after all these centuries, a Shakespearean volta, like nectar Everything actually is blurred, not just how you see. Glasses and shoes are solutions to problems that are real problems, A glass corset for the heart to see out its chest. For without glasses, the eye better sees the wind, by feeling it and closing is poison to the occasional queen bee. that of blurred world, that of touching the ground. against its grains, its grasses. For without shoes, my feet become shoes. When I am really feeling, BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY 159

56 I get very tired, I fall asleep for the seventeenth time on the unfinished skirt of glass eyes and lemon zest hemmed first, grown last. I experience the world as infinite invertedness: no wholes broken, just potential fragments straining, skull-like, at the seams. Anything could give. But no, just takes and takes and takes. I ve been trying to write the words, I cried. Cried really and wetly, and for good. Old-fashioned writing with intense excitement: the spell of quill and ink spill, quelled. What is beautiful, what is terrifying, what is absurd in me? Every possibility that colors are believable, various, 160O POETRY

57 and can be held apart as unreal, too exterior, distinct from each not that mirage I thought I d seen other wildly as sparks to seaweed or flower to meteor. It collapsed, can t draw it can t cut it out of itself. There is no color but what s already inside the eye, no power or invention or new way to wake up in the morning outside the seeing mechanism, our own orbs. Yet I can t see myself. I can never see you again. I can only see from inside my skull and when I look down I close everything not just my eyes. I wrap my own tender nether flesh in calfskin leather so buttery, melted back together BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY 161

58 like so: a newborn softened in its own mother s milk. I awoke in a panic (no ma no ma) to the smallest day yet. I dreamed I already dreamed all the dreams I d get. This morning I dressed in my last dress s last dress, fit only for a genteel gothic murder, covered up well airtight, would only fit the stabbed one, after bloodlet. Then, like a glove. Who wears it and where? I will, from the bed to the chair. Headrest, clotheshorse. Designer and model: mutually orbiting the best metaphor for bodiless idea. Amorphous, amorous, amoral, immortal. Red is dead, said blue, to you too? 162O POETRY

59 Hindquarter-gauze with silver face clamp and sickened ears pulled, unskulled. Broken backpiece. Shadow sensible by other than sight. To smell a shadow. To strike it. To trace it later, to measure a body by its line. Light s so quiet. You d think its cuttings, its edge-hole, those mousy children, would squeak at least a bit. They run like a stocking down the leg of the mind. There is no body without life. There is no mind without body. Why not quieter then? There is no without. BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY 163

60 alan ramón clinton Optical Unconscious (1) 164O POETRY

61 Optical Unconscious (2) ALAN RAMÓN CLINTON 165

62 hai-dang phan My Father s Norton Introduction to Literature, Third Edition (1981) Certain words give him trouble: cannibals, puzzles, sob, bosom, martyr, deteriorate, shake, astonishes, vexed, ode... These he looks up and studiously annotates in Vietnamese. Ravish means cướp đoạt; shits is like when you have to đi ỉa; mourners are those whom we say are full of buồn rầu. For even the like precurse of feared events think báo trước. Its thin translucent pages are webbed with his marginalia, graphite ghosts of a living hand, and the notes often sound just like him: All depend on how look at thing, he pencils after I first surmised the Horses Heads / Were toward Eternity His slanted handwriting is generally small, but firm and clear. His pencil is a No. 2, his preferred Hi-Liter, arctic blue. I can see my father trying out the tools of literary analysis. He identifies the turning point of The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber ; underlines the simile in Both the old man and the child stared ahead as if they were awaiting an apparition. My father, as he reads, continues to notice relevant passages and to register significant reactions, but increasingly sorts out his ideas in English, shaking off those Vietnamese glosses was the same year we vượt biển and came to America, where my father took Intro Lit ( for fun ), Comp Sci ( for job ). Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, he murmurs something about the dark side of life how awful it can be as I begin to track silence and signal to a cold source. Reading Ransom s Bells for John Whiteside s Daughter, a poem about a young girl s death, as my father notes, how could he not have been vexed at her brown study / Lying so primly propped, since he never properly observed (I realize this just now) his own daughter s wake. Lấy làm ngạc nhiên về is what it means to be astonished. 166O POETRY

63 Her name was Đông Xưa, Ancient Winter, but at home she s Bebe. There was such speed in her little body, / And such lightness in her footfall, / It is no wonder her brown study / Astonishes us all. In the photo of her that hangs in my parents house she is always fourteen months old and staring into the future. In reeducation camp he had to believe she was alive because my mother on visits took arms against her shadow. Did the memory of those days sweep over him like a leaf storm from the pages of a forgotten autumn? Lost in the margins, I m reading the way I discourage my students from reading. But this is how we deal with death, his black pen replies. Assume there is a reason for everything, instructs a green asterisk. Then between pp , opened to Stevens Sunday Morning, I pick out a newspaper clipping, small as a stamp, an old listing from the 404-Employment Opps State of Minnesota, and read: For current job opportunities dial (612) Answered 24 hrs. When I dial, the automated female voice on the other end tells me I have reached a non-working number. HAI-DANG PHAN 167

64 camonghne felix The Therapist Asks 3 But there were times when you offered your consent with older men. You chose them, & you were not afraid. Why not? You don t know the true success of survival till you ve experienced the adrenaline of a too-close death. What is there to fear when you ve licked the edge? It is going to be an oppressively hot summer, the New York Post says, but I ve got a few of my own stowed away, enough to occupy a foreign desert. There was one summer, his name was Tito and my sisters still say his name just like that, Tee-toww, the O a benchmark in the bottom of the jaw. I was just 12 but the gaze itself made me a flame, so no one could tell, I guess, or no one would tell. He was the kind of heavy swelter that had the whole block at mercy, everyone s connect to whatever they needed, which was much and in bulk. Power is a switch that yokes me up at the waist I was young & enamored by this pattern of men who shouldn t want me but would risk day to touch the stark chant of me. Each time, I imagined a witchcraft enveloping the bone. I remember, once, at some low hour in the trough * of that summer my mouth a voyaging boat, Tito s spine a current of illicit knots, his hand a spindle on the back of my coarse head he looks down at me, & moans out Who the fuck are you? I say, and the answer is always the same thereafter: nobody, who are you? * Okay, in any event, Elizabeth and I were in the pool, swimming and playing. 168O POETRY

65 lisa grove In the Mouth of a Terrible, Toothless God In the energy crisis my city has turned to burning angel skins. I read by their light, a book of elegies. A fruit fly lands on Amichai, I slap him flat Against the page. Now it is an elegy for him, as well, And his tomb. And I am a terrible, toothless god, Stringing blades of grass between the tongues of sheep. Ash of angel fire drifts over my head, falls in my coffee. O Holy, Holy, Holy indigestion. I bribe the coming day with open windows And freshly washed underwear Hung out on the clothesline, Slipping hastily over the hips of winds. The winds know, all you have to do is Open your mouth, the flies will come. LISA GROVE 169

66 A Lullaby, for the Fir Tree Growing in My Left Lung All we know of history we learn from scenes in the mosaic of bone on the Senate floor: The Flood makes graves of the fields, and the angels harvest enough suffering to live for another thousand years. Moses pulls off his beard and lights a cigarette, I m tired of pretending. He pushes his box of spare commandments under his bed, and as he drifts to sleep, his eyes, like caves, fill with paintings of woolly rhinos. Sailing ships forest a small island. One light shines from a caravel captain s quarters. It s Christopher Columbus. All night he s been sewing shrouds as arrival gifts for the natives. Little Chris presses his bleeding fingers to his mouth and cries quietly, No one appreciates me. God and the devil tuck him into bed. It ll get better, they say. Together they complete the shrouds for him, while he dreams of golden nipples. As it was, it is now. Spring translates the earth into hope tongues of grass taste the sea salt on the west wind and the blood on soldiers boots. This morning, one of the old poets unkillable cockroach cycled past me, yelling, You have the brightest light in America! Ha ha! 170O POETRY

67 On my dresser, a spider makes a web along the contours of my bra. We lie on the bed together; I run my hand up the muscles of your leg and feel its eons of evolution, now outlawed by the Senate. LISA GROVE 171

68 meghan o rourke The Night Where You No Longer Live Was it like lifting a veil And was the grass treacherous, the green grass Did you think of your own mother Was it like a virus Did the software flicker And was this the beginning Was it like that Was there gas station food and was it a long trip And is there sun there or drones or punishment or growth Was it a blackout And did you still create me And what was I like on the first day of my life Were we two from the start And was our time an entrance or an ending Did we stand in the heated room Did we look at the painting Did the snow appear cold Were our feet red with it, with the wet snow And then what were our names 172O POETRY

69 Did you love me or did I misunderstand Is it terrible Do you intend to come back Do you hear the world s keening Will you stay the night MEGHAN O ROURKE 173

70 marcus wicker Taking Aim at a Macy s Changing Room Mirror, I Blame Television No chain link fences leapt in a single bound. No juke move Nike commercial, speeding bullet Skittles-hued Cross Trainers. No brown skin Adonis weaving trails of industrial Vaseline down a cobblestone street. Heisman-shucking trash receptacles. Grand jeté over the little blue recycling bin, a prism of clouds rising beneath his feet. Nobody all-fucked in boot cuffs wide enough to cloak court appointed tethers. Or slumped over, hoodie-shrouded sheepishly scary according to one eye witness. Definitely not going to be your Louis V Sweat Suit red carpet fashion review, coming at you live from E! & Fox News outside of the morgue. No chance for homeboy in the peekaboo boxer shorts. Homeboy with the frozen wrists. Iced. Homeslice with the paisley, Pretty Flacko Flag flying by the seat of low-slung denim no defense attorney gets to call me Gang Related. Tupac in a mock leather bomber. No statement taken from the Clint Eastwood of your particular planned community, saying he had the right to stand his ground at the Super Target. Because my flat-billed, fitted cap cast a shady shadow over his shoulder in the checkout line. No, siree. See, I practice self target practice. There is no sight of me in my wears. I bedecked in No Wrinkle Dockers. Sensible navy blazer. Barack Obama tie, Double Consciousnessknotted. Stock dandelion pinned to the skin of an American lapel with his head blown off. 174O POETRY

71 THE LIVES OF FRANK LIMA

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73 garrett caples Introduction A member of the New York School part of a second-generation group around Frank O Hara and Kenneth Koch Frank Lima ( ) is a major Latino American poet. Yet Lima rejected both labels in relation to his poetry, and this is one reason why his work remains little known. Even the recent retrospective New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight by Jenni Quilter barely mentions him, though his presence is unavoidable: there he is in Alex Katz s painting The Cocktail Party (1965); there again in William T. Wood s photograph from the New York City Writers Conference, behind O Hara and Bill Berkson; and yet again on a Living Theatre handbill, alongside David Shapiro and Joseph Ceravolo. Though not in the book, Wynn Chamberlain s double portrait of Poets Dressed and Undressed (1964) features Lima standing behind the seated trio of O Hara, Joe Brainard, and Joe LeSueur. That same year, Lima published his first volume, Inventory: Poems, with Tibor de Nagy and he would also appear in the two New York School anthologies, The Poets of the New York School (1969) and An Anthology of New York Poets (1970). Though he told Guillermo Parra in an interview that he d[id] not align [his] lifestyle or work with the second generation New York School, it would be difficult to assemble more evidence of someone being a New York School poet than we can in the case of Frank Lima. Though New York School poets tended to be white, highly educated, and middle- to upper-class, Lima was born into poverty in Spanish Harlem on December 27, 1939, the oldest of three sons of a Mexican father, Phillip Lima, and a Puerto Rican mother, Anita Flores Lima. A prodigious alcoholic, Phillip was a hotel cook, and by age eleven Frank was working in kitchens alongside him. His mother, also alcoholic, was more educated and is listed as a registered nurse in the entry on Frank in the reference book Contemporary Authors. The marriage was troubled and ended when Lima was twelve; the family threw Phillip out of the apartment after he slashed Anita s face with a razor. Homeless and unable to keep a job, Phillip would die of alcoholism in Central Park not long after. The young Lima was subjected to multiple forms of sexual abuse. GARRETT CAPLES 177

74 As an altar boy, he was molested by a priest, who he refers to in his autobiographical Scattered Vignettes as Father Archangel. In the same poem, he records the inappropriate behavior of his father, who, drunk, would don Anita s makeup, bra, and nightgown and crawl into his sons beds to roughhouse with us. But the greatest trauma stemmed from Anita herself, who, after her husband s death, began having sex with Frank. It would be difficult to overstate how central to Lima s life and his art this incestuous relationship with his mother is. On the one hand, it sent him into a spiral of self-destruction whose consequences would have lasting effects. On the other hand, this spiral indirectly led him into the world of contemporary poetry, and the experience of his mother s abuse would form the subject matter of his best-known early poem, Mom I m All Screwed Up : With popping antennae ringlets you looked like a praying mantis cold cream & turban science fiction gleam as real as cancer spreading stuffed-tits-and-rag-guts yawning brillo-crotch that stunk all over me playing Johnny-on-the-pony on me indoors Such a portrayal seems remote from the stereotypical image of New York School poetry, yet it isn t hard to see why those poets appreciated Lima s work. As Koch writes in the preface to Inventory: Poems, In [Lima s] poems there is no moral, and no romantic exaggeration. Later, in the introduction to Inventory: New & Selected Poems, Shapiro would write of Lima s amazing lack of self-pity, and the matterof-fact dissociation from this depiction of his mother s aging body and his own intimacy with it distances Lima s early work from the 178O POETRY

75 confessional poetry of the time. Shapiro characterizes Lima s early poetry in terms of the snapshot aesthetic of Robert Frank and, in their depiction of an impoverished urban landscape, Lima s poems evoke a Beat sensibility; Allen Ginsberg was an early admirer and Lima counted both Ginsberg and Gregory Corso as influences. Yet Lima was critical of the Beat Generation s exaltation of street life, and his refusal to romanticize his difficult origins seems intimately related to his rejection of ethnic identity in relation to poetry. The assumption of identity politics is that the poet typifies a shared cultural experience to which he or she gives voice. But, as Urayoán Noel writes, Lima s work mostly eschews the social voice of the diaspora poet... If there is a political aspect to Lima s work, it has to do with the politics of experience, and with the poet as cataloger of experiences both transcendent and mundane. In an interview, Lima told Guillermo Parra that the sources I draw on for inspiration are universal : I do not want to be a Latino poet... I do not feel I have to pontificate to any one of my origins and roots... I do not want to be limited to screaming and bombast for the sake of being heard. That is esthetic colonialism and just too fuck en [sic] easy to do. Our culture is richer and classier than glorifying El Barrio... We re not just Latinos. To me, the theater is much bigger than that. It s history and heritage, and a magnificent language that is almost half Arabic. I know this of my own blood, half Mexican and half Puerto Rican that I am. This is my culture, not one or the other. Lima s disinclination to be labeled a Latino poet is thus nuanced. He deconstructs the category, pointing out he s from two Latino cultures, while he broadens the meaning of Latino culture by invoking the Arabic influence on the formation of Spanish, through the Moorish conquest of Spain. One senses too, in the disavowal of screaming and bombast, the estrangement Lima felt from the performance-oriented writers of the Nuyorican Poets Café in the seventies; in the interview with Parra, he speaks of the terribly high price he paid in his exclusion from New York P[uerto ]R[ican] anthologies GARRETT CAPLES 179

76 and other events celebrating our culture. But as Parra suggests, it may be that Lima was simply way ahead of his time, given Pedro López Adorno s contention that Lima is an important precursor to younger Nuyorican poets... the major framework of [whose] poetic endeavor centers on the individual and his/her search for a liberating identity articulated from the social, historical, political, and economic displacements the respective subjects have had to endure. At age fourteen, Lima dropped out of school and, by 1956, when he was seventeen, his gun arrests and heroin addiction landed him in a juvenile drug rehabilitation program, which he would be in and out of until 1960, when he aged out of it. Though it failed to keep him off heroin, the program proved to be Lima s salvation in the form of his encounter with the painter Sherman Drexler. Drexler was teaching art at North Brother Island when he first met the young Frank Lima. According to Drexler, Lima was influenced by Keats and Shelley and had not yet found his real voice. I lent him books by Tristan Corbière, François Villon, and William Carlos Williams. That Drexler perceived Lima to already have poetic influences contrasts with Lima s own recollection, which implies that he only began writing after their encounter. As he told Bob Holman in Poets & Writers: One day he came in with Life Studies / by Robert Lowell, when it first came out. / I was amazed I thought, I d like to write / like that, and I told Sherman. He said, / Why don t you write, then? / I was flabbergasted that he d ask / such a question. I told him quite frankly / I didn t know anything about writing, / in fact, and I remember telling him this / exactly, I don t even know the English / language. Sherman looked at me, // I ll never forget it, and said, Well, you can talk, / can t you? Why don t you write like you talk? Whether or not Lima had written poetry prior to meeting Drexler, their encounter galvanized the young poet; Drexler s epiphanic advice to write like you talk led to Lima s earliest mature work, which the painter promptly shared with his poet friends, including Lowell himself, as well as Koch and O Hara. These poets responded with enthusiasm and sent Lima books; among the other poets he recalled reading at this time are Ginsberg, Corso, Apollinaire, and Baudelaire. Lima met O Hara and Koch at the New York City Writers Conference at Wagner College, on Staten Island, in August O POETRY

77 There he would also meet two of his lifelong friends, Joeseph Ceravolo and then-teenaged David Shapiro. His new friends helped Lima land his first publication, in the Evergreen Review, in Unlike Koch, who imposed a professorial distance, O Hara offered drinking and companionship, bringing Lima everywhere from the symphony to the Cedar Tavern. O Hara took an interest in Lima s personal well-being, allowing him, during a period of relapse and homelessness, to sleep on the couch at the East Ninth Street apartment the older poet shared with Joe LeSueur. O Hara went as far as organizing an art sale through Tibor de Nagy to raise money for Lima to see a psychotherapist. The two Franks also collaborated on a play, Love on the Hoof, intended for an unrealized Andy Warhol film project called Messy Lives. Like many, Lima was deeply affected by O Hara s 1966 death. Because O Hara personally constituted a social nexus for so many artists and writers, his death brought a premature end to a major phase of the New York School. Some of Lima s distance from the scene also resulted from his continuing struggle with heroin. When Ron Padgett and Shapiro began preparing the New York Poets anthology in 1967, Lima was the only contributor unable to supply an author photo, because he was in jail. In the following decade, Lima published two books, Underground with the Oriole and Angel: New Poems, and received an MFA, despite his lack of even a high school diploma, from Columbia University (that he was able to enroll was undoubtedly due to the influence of Koch, who served as Lima s advisor). But even as he received this academic and professional validation, Lima began to withdraw from the poetry scene because of familial obligations, embarking on a series of high-end executive chef positions in Manhattan. Achieving sobriety for the first time in his adult life also drove Lima further away from the poetry world; not only did he need to avoid the hard-drinking atmosphere of places like the Cedar Tavern, but he had difficulty writing in the absence of drugs and alcohol. As the eighties began, Lima s life as a poet had seemingly ended. Had Lima never resumed writing, he might rate as an extraordinary but minor poet, one of several colorful footnotes of New York School poetry. But his silence was not to last. In the late 80s, he told Bob Holman, I was clean, / unhappily married, and desperate. / I started to write again as the marriage / ended. While Lima s earlier poems increasingly incorporated a surrealist tendency, the later work might be seen as the full realization of this impulse: GARRETT CAPLES 181

78 I found the words in a box and became recklessly enamored with Them. As I watched, they blew smoke rings into my sacramental Face. I was a blind old man, unzipping my life before them and Trembling at the touch of cold marble. My fingers were once wild Pigeons perched on the statues and I would sacrifice my soul for the Erotic stillness of yesterday. The words would arrive through the nail Holes in the century wearing the flickering faces of the past. I fit myself Into anyone that will have me, who will shoot at me with the hours of a Wheelchair. When will I stop looking over my shoulder in the subway? I collected the tickets at the door, and made it perfectly clear that Writing is as lonely as a pile of discarded shoes. Heaven is wingless and Far away and there are no books that mention your name or mine. This poem, , is typical of later Lima. Frequently untethered to any recognizable scenario, even as they often seem to deliberate on the act of writing itself, the poems move effortlessly from assertion to assertion, with no sense of logical development. Yet they seem the opposite of random phrasemaking, instead motivated by an inner emotional necessity. Intriguingly, in light of his more open field-like compositions of the sixties, quatrains sometimes varied as tercets or quintains predominate. Filip Marinovich, who attended Lima s workshops at the Poetry Project around 2000, offers insight into Lima s compositional process: It s not like he would write quatrains. He would just freewrite. He even had these Xeroxes of Peter Elbow s freewriting manual from the 70s or 80s... And he would just freewrite and divide it up into quatrains... And there was something about that new form that allowed him to write poetry where he felt like he couldn t write poetry before because it was part of the whole vortex of addictions. Any distinction here between freewriting and automatic writing 182O POETRY

79 is probably academic, and it s clear that the use of Peter Elbow s techniques resulted in a form of automatism that liberated Lima s imagination in the absence of mind-altering substances. In 1997, Lima was drawn back to the poetry world when Hard Press published his Inventory: New & Selected Poems, edited by Shapiro. Over the next few years he would find himself featured in such places as the American Poetry Review and the Poetry Society of America, and even on the cover of Poets & Writers. Much of this was preparatory to a new collection, The Beatitudes, an incendiary volume of invectives against the Judeo-Christian tradition. The book was announced, scheduled for publication in 2000, and even typeset, but ultimately never appeared due to upheaval at Hard Press. This was a source of great bitterness to Lima, destroying the momentum of his comeback in the poetry world. Despite this, the last two decades of Lima s life were probably his happiest. Lima became more prolific after an encounter with Koch before the latter s 2002 death. Lima s wife, Helen, recalls Lima visiting Koch in the hospital: Kenneth told Frank that you have to write every single day. When you write, it s not like someone doing a job. This has to come from you... Frank tried really, really hard to write a poem every day. As a result, there are hundreds of pages of work from the last decade of his life, and the bulk of Lima s poetry remains unpublished. But it is with this late work that we can ultimately support the claim that he is a major poet. For here Lima developed a distinctive mode that accommodated everything from the quotidian to the literary and historical to the most exalted displays of surrealist imagination. Only in the last year of his life, which was beset with health problems, did Lima s output diminish. He died on Monday, October 21, He struggled so hard; he wanted to get better, Helen Lima said. The day he passed away, that Sunday, he woke up in the morning and it came right off his lips. Helen, when are we gonna go to Cancún again? I still want to take you to Cancún. It s an expression of both romantic longing and the will to live characteristic of a poet for whom poetry represented an escape from suffering and a means of survival. GARRETT CAPLES 183

80 frank lima Epicedium to Potter s Field My father was A blossom, And I was his fragile Epiphyte on his Days off. The purple Dogs of years Gone by Watch him smile At the horizon. His feretory Catches the Rain from the Smoldering sky. These fields are Fallow and dried Gullies where gin Sparkled In the morning. My father s remains Are smooth like the Starlight that Makes my life Slightly yellow. 184O POETRY

81 Incidents of Travel in Poetry Happy Birthday Kenneth Koch/Feb 27 We went to all those places where they restore sadness and joy and call it art. We were piloted by Auden who became Unbearably acrimonious when we dropped off Senghor into the steamy skies of his beloved West Africa. The termites and ants were waiting for him to unearth the sun in Elissa. The clouds were as cool as a dog s nose pressed against our cheeks. I notice your eggshell skin is as creamy as a lion s armpit as we cross the horizon on strands of Yeats silver hair. There is a light coffee flame in his eyes guiding us like an old Irish house cleaner holding a candle in a black and white English movie. Yeats lips look like an angry Rimbaud illuminating poetry with his youth and vigorous sunlight. He knew eternity would vanish the sun at dusk. He caught it with a rainbow tied to his finger. There was nothing left after that. We cross the equator heading north following Emily Dickinson s black bag containing stems of her longer poems preserved in darkness and memory like wild pearls thrown overboard to avoid capture by Spanish pirates. The islands below float by like water hearts in a child s aquarium. We are candy wrappers being blown across the waxed floors of poetry. We land on the Brooklyn Bridge. Whitman s past-port face is grinning at the nineteenth century in the thorny arms of Gerard Manley Hopkins whose head was set on fire by God s little hands. The hands that circumcised the world. Gertrude Stein is a match flaring on a young woman s pillow whose birthmarks have been stolen. We cross the green Atlantic into World War One. We are met by Rilke dressed in his Orpheus uniform wearing white sonnet gloves that once belonged to a stone angel. Rilke offers us a glass of amontillado made from Lorca s private stock of gypsy tears. The sherry is not quite as dry as Wallace Stevens lush mango metaphors of familiar objects. Although Stevens poems are fragrant, there is a lingering afterthought of Pound on the tongue. Pound collected his misty feelings to make raindrops FRANK LIMA 185

82 186O POETRY into European and American poetry. Vagueness became as sharp as a pencil. Our blue box is not allowed to attend Apollinaire s birthday party held by the august Académie française on the Eiffel Tower. He is being awarded the Golden Frog Souffle Award and a one-way ticket to the Greek and Roman past to spend afternoons with Williams filling wheelbarrows with the twentieth century. Both Apollinaire and Williams could hail a cab on Madison Avenue in any country. After the bash we toured Paris and London with D.H. Lawrence who kept stopping to relieve himself of the great mysteries of life whenever we went by a Bavarian gentian plant. He claimed he was writing poetry for his new book: Acts of Attention for Love Poems. Eliot was rebuilding London when we left. It reminded him of Detroit or Cincinnati or Saint Louis. He was removing despair from the weather. He thought it affected people s minds and did not want to overload Mayakovsky s emptiness with old English churches that pray for water heaters and cloudless nights. Mayakovsky, on the other hand, insisted there were bugs in Russia who could write poetry just as interestingly as Eliot. The Russian winter is elegant cruelty compared with the English milk-toast weather: A man without a cloud in his trousers is not a man. Eliot thought this was the most boring statement he had ever heard. Although Cummings poems appear unintentional on the surface, he did not act like a drunken amputee at the dinner table and always said pleasant things that came out of nowhere. His conversation was experimental but logical and he investigated words, mixing them on paper with a pencil. Cummings was all etcetera after a few drinks. We move the sun to South America. Neruda had become an organic poet writing about the fulcra of yes and no. He wasn t home when we got there, so we went over to Allen s for some microbiotic poetry. As usual, Allen was rolling incense and howling at America. Allen was always mystical and beautiful when he walked on the Lower East Side. When he stepped into the old Jewish

83 pavement, he mystified the habitués. David Shapiro, the Djinn of subatomic poetry, asked Allen what was the future of poetry in the borough of Queens? Allen placed the palm of his right hand on David s glistening forehead and said: David, don t you know? The future has no future. It is very old and doesn t worry about its future anymore, because it has so little left of it. Allen made suicide exhilarating when he wrote Kaddish. Finally, suicide could talk about the pain of living with unbearable beauty. Beauty was Frank O Hara talking to Second Avenue with a diamond in his head. We were the personal details in Frank s harem of private lives when LeRoi insisted on becoming black, abandoning us for a noble cause, according to Frank, who loved Imamu Amiri Baraka. We were the details in Frank s poems and living one s life was a detail in Frank s life. John Ashbery arrived from Paris on a plane made of expensive suits, shirts, and ties. Like his poems, he was sparkling and squeaky clean, dressed in elegant language. He is the daydream that had become a poet. His subject is to have no subject. Perhaps a casual reference to someone special. He is a poet of the less obvious in life: the sestina made of clouds. We crossed the equator on our way to a cocktail party for Gary Snyder. There is no other life for his outdoor poems, hitchhiking on hands-on love. Gary seems to have time to write poems about the notes in his life. Kenneth, on the other hand, has a paper cup full of wonderful poems. He can write a poem about a cathedral living in a paper cup. Kenneth travels everywhere with his paper cup. At a certain time of day, Kenneth finds room in his paper cup for perfect days and perfect moments: Perfect moments when Frank spoke to us. Perfect moments when Allen spoke to us. And they sang to us with human wings upon which we sleep. FRANK LIMA 187

84 Byron I put my hand Into the dream That falls upon The air. It Touches me a little, But I don t complain. I m almost asleep When I get there. Where Byron Lost the scent of his Life, over there, Where the dreams are. It s always Hot, like The eyes of the Dream. Sometimes The dream is On the dunes Watching the molten Ocean burn the sun. The dream scours the Sand in your fish Tank for the plastic Mermaid who is gaining weight. Nevertheless, We go to the edge To watch the dream And the repetition being Hurled ashore like A drop of blue, You wrote in a poem, In a language You alone Understand In the dream. 188O POETRY

85 Juarez These empty words are so remote. They are stories someone wants To believe at the end of the century. Everyone gathers their sea of telluric Pain to greet the beginning of the new world. Cars stop and watch the deck chairs limp across the street to await The coming of the new year. It is the end of summer and autumn and Winters and springs, and panzer infatuation. After four hundred eighty-one years, I cannot pull out the Spanish arrow In my eye. Suddenly everything I knew was inhuman: The oceans, the tadpoles in their new cars. The clams became Cheerleaders. The palm trees, strippers, and everyone forgot, Deer are the shapes of God. His official language became Latin, when he ceased to be a Jew, Biting his nails and collecting cans like a cheap minister with sunny gold teeth. The tender years that once wore oysters would never speak to Him again. The female spider became a lesbian, devouring our new long legs, That would never again climb the toy steps our fathers left us. Although Our legs are hairy and the lilies of a theater, the gentle lips of Our pyramids rest on our souls like a lover s fingers. How many aspirins will we take to reach the surface of truth? My existence is for sale. The dawn is learning English. The waves of the sea are unionizing. The stones that were once our troubled hearts are eating chocolate. I come to sell you fish, the bread in my blood and my existence. FRANK LIMA 189

86 Heckyll & Jeckyll Crows see us as another invention. Like summer and beauty, They shimmer at sunrise in their new cars, Change their names and color when they see us. When they fly, they re the bite marks on the sun, And nail-scratches of black against the sky. We matter little to them as we are. They prefer hamburger, youth, Oxygen and mineral water. And, of course, we sell our souls to a passing crow, Because we re shiny things they take to heaven. Crows are always polite to humans. They have lots of money And live at a party that never ends. We re the junk genes they left behind, That play Aztec football with our heads, When we dream and lose. Crows have relatives everywhere. Human warfare moves across the sky Making more room for them to fly. We re just a meal in the next world. We re the hole in the sky. Crows are legends and instructors of grace. They are the dots in the fog, And the flight of the uterus. Crows are the printed warnings Of a wasted life. They will never leave or abandon us. 190O POETRY

87 When we take our last breath, Navigating through our mistakes and lies, The crows will take our last word. We are the last citizens of a pale race of crows, Rearranging the furniture in the mind of God. Crows turn the planet on its axis when we die, And do nothing to the body we ll remember. Our souls are their meal of the day. And the blue marble in its beak, As it flies away, Is the world leaving you. FRANK LIMA 191

88 Felonies and Arias of the Heart I need more time, a simple day in Paris hotels and window shopping. The croissants will not bake themselves and the Tower of London would Like to spend a night in the tropics with gray sassy paint. It has many Wounds and historic serial dreams under contract to Hollywood. Who will play the head of Mary, Queen of Scots, and who will braid her Hair? Was it she who left her lips on the block for the executioner, Whose hands would never find ablution, who would never touch a woman Again or eat the flesh of a red animal? Blood pudding would repulse him Until joining Anne. That is the way of history written for Marlow and Shakespear. They are with us now that we are sober and wiser, Not taking the horrors of poetry too seriously. Why am I telling you this Nonsense, when I have never seen you sip your coffee or tea, In the morning? Not to mention, Never heard you sing, although some claim it is quite grand. Will you teach me to sing like Chaliapin? Will I impress you with my Cartoon Russian accent? I like sour cream and borsht; We went to school together. My minor was caviar and blinis. This is what it means to listen to Boris Godunov late at night. Cool mornings are for Lakmé and songs of flowers for misplaced lovers. But why should we speak in a foreign language to each other, We are not birds. I have other stories too strange and beautiful to be Told. They have no sound or memory. They will rest on your lips when You bring your hands to your mouth to stop their gush of air against 192O POETRY

89 your Face. We should go back and meet again at the street fair of cufflinks. Our hearts teach us how to fly with wings of pain. That is the price of the disarticulated lessons we should not abstain from Playing. The accumulated misdemeanors add up to the most egregious Felony: ignoring the demands of the heart. We remain in abeyance to The muses who are only interested in their outcomes, We are just the worms on their hooks of selfishness. What do they care, we are not Greek. We are just a dream of pleasant Comic arias that suffice as whims in the morning. We are small enemies to them with strange large hearts that control the Weather in the heavens. They cannot change or unteach us not to Trespass their quarters of endowment. Perhaps, after all, you are an Affable spirit bubbling over with your own deductions to minimize the Pointed dots in your beautiful endeavors. Although I feel like a bird with a broken wing, Each day I think of you I fumble an attempt to fly to impress you with The color of my paper wings. FRANK LIMA 193

90 Bright Blue Self-Portrait I thank the spiders webs and the circus dancers who stain our eyes with Rapid movements and authorize our handcuffs to make no distinction Between night and day or love and hate. No one will know the sum of our arduous daily separations from bed to Work. These pillars actually belong to you since I have not counted them Or know any more than you do where they are or in what country they Still exist. We can put all our concerns into a loaf of bread and French Kisses, go to movies and watch the splashing milk on the screen imitate the forest in the moonlight. Why all the fuss about the patrons becoming Feathers, discharging their ideas of nobility on the evening news? There Are no lights in the theater just soft snow from the balcony that is the Little red schoolhouse where all this began. Actually it was because of you I did not attend as often as I should have. I was too embarrassed to face you across the clay modeling tables since I Always felt like the clay in your hands was a cartoon version of my teen Years, dear slippery-fish ladies of the sleepy west. Don t forget, my early life will be yours, too, With its self-descriptions of poetic justice, The tiny creatures we write about can describe themselves in the moss We leave behind. 194O POETRY

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93 david wheatley So Much Better Than Most Things Written on Purpose This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray, by Mark Ford. Eyewear Publishing Where Have You Been? Selected Essays, by Michael Hofmann. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $ Few people write poetry well; fewer write well about poetry; and fewer again manage to do both. By this yardstick, Mark Ford s This Dialogue of One and Michael Hofmann s Where Have You Been? look to have it all sown up between them: two exemplary tutorials in how to write about poetry by a pair of the best poets in the Anglosphere. What s more, each book is an accident, cobbled together from essays and reviews, and thus (in Elizabeth Bishop s words for Madame de Sévigné) so much better than most things written on purpose. Basil Bunting likened assembling his Collected Poems to screwing together the boards of his coffin, by which logic collections of literary journalism are more like wayside shrines (reviews, after all, are often hit and runs) or dedicated park benches, ideal for a quick stop but not the kind of place one fancies lingering for eternity. As such, literary journalism seems ideally placed to ponder the connection between quotidian critical horse-trading and the longer views of posterity. One poet whose thoughts were seldom far from whispers of immortality is John Donne, subject of the first essay in Mark Ford s collection. Ford imagines Donne s congregation greeting his cadaverous appearance at the end of his life with Ezekiel s Shall these bones live? For extended stretches of his posterity, the answer was No. To Samuel Johnson, metaphysical poetry was violent and unnatural, and to Coleridge Donne was rhyme s sturdy cripple, whose muse on dromedary trots. The revival of Donne s reputation in modern times owes much to T.S. Eliot s early literary journalism, but the version of the canon sketched in Tradition and the Individual Talent gives little sense of the accidents of the literary afterlife by which Donne and other poets achieve or lose their berth in the canon. Rather, Eliot writes, the existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, modified by the introduction of new DAVID WHEATLEY 197

94 works of art, but in ways that confirm the underlying continuity of the mind of Europe. Even when no one read him, Donne retained his intrinsic value, like the tree in the forest conscientiously emitting a noise when it falls over, with or without anyone there to hear it. It s nice to have the canon to hand in any argument as an impersonal force of nature, impervious to any preferences of ours. A colleague of mine once pitched an edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to a London editor, and received a fairly unanswerable rejection, as rejections go: Posterity has spoken. The Olympian impersonal note struck by Eliot is difficult to strike in a mere book review, however. John Redmond, a critic of a pragmatist bent, has suggested that it is not the task of the critic to be unfailingly right, but to make a case; and while Ford and Hofmann are adept at burnishing their opinions with a look of permanence, their manner is at a far remove from Eliot s curating of canonical certainties. Neither Ford nor Hofmann is likely to call for back-up from the mind of Europe too marmoreal an entity by half for reviewers of New York Yiddish poet Samuel Greenberg, subhuman antipodean redneck Les Murray, or Walt Whitman. Hofmann s title, Where Have You Been?, is doubly apt: first as a response to the poetry air-miles the critic has clocked up, but second as an acknowledgement of the eureka moments along the way, such as the poetry of Karen Solie ( the one by whom the language lives, according to Hofmann, echoing Joseph Brodsky). Skimmers of Ford s and Hofmann s contents pages will also be struck by the near-total absence of reviewees from their gene pool of immediate contemporaries. Readers turning to these books in search of updates on British poetry will learn nothing of Carol Ann Duffy, Don Paterson, Simon Armitage, or others of the post-new Generation age. In his last book of essays, Behind the Lines, the Freiburg im Breisgau-born Hofmann described British writing as being at the edge of my circle, while Ford s birthplace of Nairobi might account for some of his centrifugal tendencies (a study of French eccentric Raymond Roussel, as well as his unmatched engagement for a British poet with the work of John Ashbery). Try imagining a Randall Jarrell who never wrote about Bishop or Lowell. The folks at home, wherever home may be, can potter away all they like on Britannic poetry of the post-thatcher era, but for Ford and Hofmann the action is elsewhere. Internationalism in poetry is a telescope trained on writing invisible to the naked eye, but it can be a distorting mirror too. Anyone 198O POETRY

95 who has studied the poetry section in a foreign bookshop will know the disorienting experience of realizing there are still people who think the most important modern American poet is Charles Bukowski. The first thing to say about Ford and Hofmann s internationalism is the heavyweight rebuke they represent to lumpen Anglocentrism, in a world where as we recently learned a mere 93 books of poetry in translation were published in the United States in Ford writes on Baudelaire and Alfred Jarry, and the German half of Hofmann s book deals with Gottfried Benn, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Max Beckmann, Kurt Schwitters, Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Bernhard, Günter Grass, and Robert Walser, plus a critical assassination of Stefan Zweig. (Just to give some idea of scale here, the Ford book is shorter than the Hofmann, but several of the essays in Hofmann s are shorter than anything in Ford s.) Discussing Baudelaire, Ford echoes Françoise Meltzer s suggestion that the French poet is incomplete these days without the work of Walter Benjamin: critic creates poet. The same inversion is often true of poetry in translation, where famous translators can absorb their foreign poets like multinationals completing a hostile takeover; the fact that Rilke can t get his name onto the cover of the Faber edition of Don Paterson s Orpheus tells us something not too salutary about Anglophone visions of world poetry today and their implicit power dynamic. More often, in the old joke, translators are like goalkeepers: pilloried for their mistakes while their humdrum successes go unsung. When goalkeepers do get noticed it tends to be for something outré, like Colombian shot-stopper René Higuita s scorpion kick. Hofmann on translation is no less preposterous. In Behind the Lines there was his vivisection of Péter Nádas s A Book of Memories ( it deforms a void ), and here there is his full-on assassination of Alissa Valles s Zbigniew Herbert translations. The wresting of Herbert away from his long-time translators John and Bogdana Carpenter is a sorry saga, and whatever one thinks of Valles s versions one cannot envy her being stuck in the cross fire. Also worth pointing out, not that he conceals the fact, is that Hofmann reads no Polish. But where is the fidelity, you may say, he writes of his aim, as a translator, to make a difference : where is the accuracy, the self-effacement, the service? Hofmann has used the pages of this magazine to answer a reader working on the Venn diagram model of word-forword equivalency in translation with There is no more dismal or, DAVID WHEATLEY 199

96 frankly, stupid way of reading a translation than to pick on single words. There are some translators, he writes, who will work not just from a dictionary but a period dictionary, to avoid rendering anything Hölderlin said in German into anything Johnny-come-lately Ashbery might say in English. After which, as Hofmann observes, they presumably go and track down a two-hundred-year-old reader to complete the circle of authenticist solipsism. Flannery O Connor thought the short story was at risk of dying of competence, and in translation, too, competence is the enemy of excellence. When Robert Lowell translates lice (a legal dispute) in Baudelaire as lice or Ezra Pound translates tacta puella (girl touched [by the sound of music]) in Propertius as devirginated young ladies, we savor their mistakes as the mistakes of major poets in their own right. Readers without a knowledge of the original will miss the joke, but comedy is never improved by stopping the act for an explanation and Hofmann is unapologetic about his conception of translation as an extension (a multiplier!) of writing a poem, rather than a dutiful substitute for independent creation. The opposition of original and target language is muddied in Hofmann s case by his being a native speaker of English and German, so however skewwhiff reviewers might find his translated German (an outraged A.S. Byatt drew up a kill-list of words like sprog and gobsmacked ), it s not as though he s doing it by accident. As a non-rhymer, Hofmann needs to be inventive about making things difficult for himself, and ups the ante with a deathby-misadventure alert for translators working on dual-text editions: A poem translation can feel like the bundled-up corpse of an insect that s got caught in a spider s web, an overzealous parcel, attached by a thousand threads to the thing that will wait for it to die and then eat it. This is translator/critic as reverse vampire, a grave-robber, but one intent on draining blood into, not out of, the host text. Like Seamus Heaney s Tollund man, that bridegroom to the goddess, the translation offers itself up for burial alive that others may live. On Ford s side, Hofmann s polyglot omniscience is matched by a commitment to turning up poets that might as well write in Sumerian for all the attention they have managed to pick up in English. For a Faber poet championed by John Ashbery and Helen Vendler and, like Hofmann, regularly spotted in the London Review of Books and 200O POETRY

97 New York Review of Books, Ford does an excellent impersonation of one of British poetry s natural outsiders, but his commitment to the badlands of the neglected, the forgotten, the never-read-in-the-firstplace, really is impeccable. Every critic who has grumbled at a lazy canonical consensus, or the settled science of the prizewinners lists, should ask themselves: When did you last rescue a poet from utter oblivion? Ford does so here in the first-ever essay on Joan Murray ( ), Auden s opening choice in his twelve-year stint as a Yale Younger Poets judge. By the looks of it, Ford may have turned up something special, but the curious have no easy way of corroborating his findings: any copy of Murray s Poems (1947) I see online commands a three-figure price. This adds a tinge of melancholy to Ford s library-cormoranting. Once again, shall these bones live? Another essay presses the merits of A.S.J. Tessimond and Bernard Spencer, midcentury English writers of no school and almost no reputation, though now restored to print. Ford compares Tessimond to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Victorian poète maudit and favorite of Ashbery s, a poet who drifted so far in his German exile from the home country that he began to forget his English. The hinterland of English-language poetry written by non-native speakers is ideally suited to Ford s transnational understanding of the canon, as explored in an essay on the Vienna-born, Yiddish-speaking Samuel Greenberg. This time Ford hasn t quite got there first: Hart Crane picked over his work in the 1920s and plundered it for Emblems of Conduct. Greenberg s grasp of idiomatic English was shaky ( Ah! thus fathomed crowns earnestly will woe thee! ), but when Crane expressed misgivings about exploiting this hapless (and dead) innocent, Malcolm Cowley and Allen Tate reassured him his borrowings were quite legitimate. In a variant on Eliot s wisecrack about good poets borrowing and great poets stealing, it would seem (pace Kenneth Goldsmith) that when students do it it s plagiarism, but when published poets do it it s intertextuality. Another poet from this twilight zone is Ivan Blatný, a Czech refugee in postwar Britain whose confinement in a psychiatric hospital meant that, for many years, his writing was thrown away unread. Blatný comes up by way of another mid-century English neglectorino (also, as fate would have it, admired by Ashbery: only connect!), Nicholas Moore, whose work fell fatally out of fashion after the Movement takeover of the 1950s. Literary history loves a disappearing act Rimbaud, Weldon Kees, Rosemary Tonks but Moore fell into the altogether DAVID WHEATLEY 201

98 blander category of the still-prolific poet that nobody wanted to read or publish. Ford compares his fate and Blatný s to that of Emily Dickinson, whose draft disjecta membra have been the subject of a sumptuous facsimile edition (Marta Werner and Jen Bervin s The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson s Envelope Poems). Never mind the vagaries of the critical afterlife, which scraps of paper get thrown away and which become archival fetish objects is a cruel and capricious business too. Literary criticism has two purposes, said Eliot: the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste. Ford s elucidating torch has a long reach, but when it comes to correcting taste, Hofmann is out on his own. The man of genius is duty-bound to attack, Thomas Bernhard said, and those unfamiliar with Hofmann s natural pugilism may read his attack on Stefan Zweig and assume he has succumbed to a dose of Bernhardism, or critical Tourette s syndrome. Zweig is uniquely dreary, his suicide note more like an Oscar acceptance speech just putrid. Even the unexceptionable (you might think) fact that Zweig quite enjoyed writing becomes a giveaway sign of his second-rateness. By the end of the essay we feel, to quote Hofmann on Bernhard, that something is being clobbered so hard that we quite possibly mistakenly, and out of the goodness of our hearts laugh. One pictures John Goodman in Barton Fink charging down a hotel corridor in flames with a shotgun, bellowing I ll show you the life of the mind! For Hofmann it is a given that ours is a tarnished age ( our postepistolary (no joke), postliterary, almost postalphabetical decline, ) and like a dragon breathing fire in his sleep he can t help throwing out anathemas on no discernible provocation from the matter at hand ( Most poetry written nowadays is again as sanctimonious and as imperially overblown as in the 1940s and 1950s ). When Dennis O Driscoll s posthumous essay collection, The Outnumbered Poet, appeared in 2013, Theo Dorgan in The Irish Times found himself struggling with O Driscoll s inexplicable proclivity for pronouncing judgement a professional shortcoming in a critic if ever there was one. Those unhappy with disruptive reviewers will often appeal to the calm of future canons, in which all our local rows have been resolved. Talent, like murder, will out, runs the argument. But posterity will always need a bit of a push to get its engine running. Perhaps it was in bad form back then too when prewar reviewers suggested that the forgotten Pulitzer Prize winners Margaret Widdemer, Leonora Speyer, Robert Hillyer, Audrey 202O POETRY

99 Wurdemann, and Robert P.T. Coffin had been promoted beyond their bardic pay grade. Hofmann doesn t confine himself to unqualified noes, when a no it is. A review of Adam Zagajewski stands out for its downgrading of the praise Hofmann has previously doled out to this poet. Zagajewski has become Parnassian, he finds on rereading, too practiced at producing poetry as a sort of preserve, praise for the sake of praise, bestowing his benedictions on everything in sight like a punch-drunk pope. The suggestion that Zagajewski s émigré status, or collusion with other people s expectations of the émigré poet, is complicit in his decline strikes an uneasy note: there are few things sadder than the émigré poet brewing his export beer under license and slowly watering it down until it may as well have been Coors Light all along. Perhaps Hofmann s sharp tongue is designed to ward off this fate for himself. He is quick to slap down any signs of boosterism: a word I certifiably use for the first and last time in print! he says of his description of Ted Hughes s Collected Poems as awesome, before later in the same paragraph calling Hughes arguably the greatest English poet since Shakespeare. It s a daring gambit, even if the essay that follows fails to dispel my misgivings about Hughes. For me, Hughes enjoys the uneasy distinction of being most famous for his worst work, with Birthday Letters (his greatest book, thought Andrew Motion) the overcooked limelight-stealer-in-chief in all its determinist melodrama. A panegyric to Frederick Seidel features a dig at the blandly vegan compound of contemporary poetry, the one Hofmann barb this vegan poet-critic jibbed at, though it also made me wonder whether sacralized animal harm isn t fairly close to the heart of what s wrong with his beloved Hughes. Like Prince Charles, Hughes combined a meat eater s version of animal love with a belief in the hereditary divine right of our fox-hunting overlords. This is where Hofmann s comparison of Hughes and Lawrence derails, for me. It also made me wonder about Hofmann s fondness, in Hughes, Seidel, and supremely in Lowell, for troubled patriarchs, terrors of the earth, poets seldom found in these postliterate times below the snowline of the NYRB or other such altitudinous venues. The Lowell agon has been Hofmann s lutte avec l ange from the start, all the way back to that abandoned PhD on him at Cambridge. But here and there in Where Have You Been? there are signs of dissent. Hofmann bewails the reluctance of New York School admirers to grant Lowell his place in the sun alongside Schuyler and DAVID WHEATLEY 203

100 O Hara, then confesses to the heretical thought that perhaps he likes Schuyler better than Lowell. And then there is Bishop, whose relationship with Lowell has come to resemble the husband and wife figures in ornamental Black Forest clocks, one forever forced to go back inside before the other can come out. There are some critical either/ors that define whole eras: Wordsworth v. Coleridge, Miłosz v. Herbert, Levertov v. Duncan, but none for Hofmann more epic or inexhaustible than this. Epic is exactly the wrong word to apply to Bishop, that least demonstrative of writers (Hofmann flirts with applying unurgent, used of a motorboat in Cape Breton, to the poet herself), while simultaneously too obvious a put-down of Lowell. What might have made for epic conflict between two alpha males is displaced in the subtlest ways in the ceremonial pas de deux they danced round each other over the decades. On at least two crucial occasions, the publication of Imitations and Notebook, Bishop treated Lowell to potentially devastating critiques ( art just isn t worth that much, as she said of his recycling of Elizabeth Hardwick s letters), but among the most damning accusations Hofmann levels against Lowell is how, by contrast, he seems not to have absorbed Bishop s work at all. Received. Off to Carlow for a few days, wrote one of James Joyce s brothers, acknowledging a copy of Ulysses, but Lowell doesn t do much better when faced with a reference to awful but cheerful in a Bishop letter ( the future looks cheerful, but at our age who can ever tell ). Has he even read the poem? Quite possibly not. Hofmann doesn t much care for pre-life Studies Lowell, preferring the poet in his dilapidated senescence, but his powerful nostalgia for the alpha male team-sheet is a marked difference from Ford. (Ford s modern American canon tends more to Eliot, Stevens, Mina Loy, Jarrell, Ashbery, and James Tate.) While happy to bat for Schuyler and the New York School, in the main Hofmann shows no great interest in their more recent British or Irish equivalents (his favorite contemporary British poet appears to be Tom Paulin, which earns him points for ingenuity if nothing else). In a piece on Basil Bunting he conjures the uchronia of what progressive verse might have become if Pound and Eliot hadn t disappeared into funny money and High Anglicanism, but Hofmann isn t, in the main, very exercised about haring after it. Are these local blind-spots the price we pay for Hofmann s globe-trotting perspectives? A good test case is the essay on that enforcer-in-chief of literary London, Ian Hamilton. Though Ian Hamilton died in 2001 of cancer, Hofmann begins 204O POETRY

101 his encomium, I still see him sometimes in party rooms, at literary gatherings... It may come as a surprise to American readers of Hamilton s biographies of Lowell and J.D. Salinger to learn that he was a poet too, but the crowding out of the poetry by the prose was all part of the Faustian pact, the bullshit-busting critic painting the poet into a smaller and smaller corner. Hofmann writes touchingly of the glum-faced miniatures of The Visit, prodding delicately at parental death and marital breakdown, but when Hamilton tries to make poetry out of the world of literary journalism (in An Alternative Agenda, with its cameo role for Ian Hamilton, All-purpose lit. hist. hack, / Invisible behind a cloud of smoke ), the atmosphere turns stagey and grotesque. This would be the same hack figure we find ploughing through The Middle Years in Biography, before the last line springs its trap: Now look at him. Who turned the page? The hardboiled quality is all to the good, but suggests a certain self-martyring, applying the screw to his own thumbs and turning it, too. It s revealing that Hofmann should say of the Hamilton project that he ran his magazines without really making any discoveries or launching any notable careers : were they not, at base, gloriously exclusionary enterprises, ideally diminishing to a single angel (who?) on a pin. If Hamilton wanted to kill a book, he would rough it up in The Observer, come back anonymously for seconds in the Times Literary Supplement, then find a minion to finish it off in The Review, which he edited. Such are the stories one finds lovingly recycled by Hamilton s young men (Clive James, Craig Raine, David Harsent), half in a spirit of cowed awe, half in the hope that one of them might break the cycle and elicit a wintry nod of approval from the maestro at last. Who then has Hofmann discovered, or championed for the export market? Step forward Karen Solie. Really, excellent though Karen Solie is, why not Jen Hadfield, Alan Gillis, or Justin Quinn? It s rare to find oneself worrying that an author under review might be overqualified for the job at hand, but world-bestriding is nothing without depth-perception, too. Keen to spread the word about Les Murray in the early nineties, Blake Morrison tried to sell him as a package deal, one quarter of an international superleague that also included Heaney, Walcott, and Brodsky. On this logic, poets go global by leaving their local specificities behind. I thought I detected a whiff of cosmopolitanese in an aside on plastic Scots in Hofmann s essay on W.S. Graham; the Scottish-born Graham lived in Cornwall and was skeptical of Hugh MacDiarmid s use of Synthetic Scots, DAVID WHEATLEY 205

102 a phenomenon Hofmann, with apparent disapproval, notices has been raising its head again in recent times. If it s all right for Hofmann to drop an incredibile dictu here or a Bleistiftgebiet there, reciprocal rights should be extended to a Scots scunnersome or wanchancy as part of the critical vocabulary, one would have thought. The only reason not to would be the assumption that some languages pass muster, internationally, while others are condemned to the authentic and the limited and the local register for which Hofmann expresses sharp distaste. I say apparent disapproval of poetic Scots, since soon enough Hofmann is recalling eight boyhood years in Edinburgh and the trace elements ( postie, wee, agley, first-footing ) he finds they have left in his translations of texts with no Scottish dimension at all. At the heart of Hofmann s poetics is a narrative of decline theory. Poetry has lost face since Lowell s time, descending in the States into a banal derby between two awful teams, while Britain makes do with its variety show of cheery populism. For the real titans, you have to go back to the twenties and the apotheosized generation of Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Pound, Yeats, and Bunting. Another aspect of Hofmann s declinism is a sense of how long it has been since poetry enjoyed anything like the prestige of fiction. Where Have You Been? is in two parts, with non-anglophones and fiction writers occupying the second, though the fiction writers are entirely non- Anglophone too. Hofmann s thoughts on his American poets turn irresistibly to the state of the nation, but where his essays on Benn and Enzensberger are shadowed by pieces on Walser and Bernhard, his American poets are not placed in dialogue with Bellow, Pynchon, or Roth. This leaves Lowell and Seidel all the more splendidly (abjectly) exposed as laureates of the post-imperial American moment. Ford sticks more closely to poetry than Hofmann (a few pieces on poets prose aside) and is less given to headline-stealing statements, but writing on Jarrell he notes the American s concern for the helpless or voiceless or overlooked. It s a quality much to the fore in This Dialogue of One. How predisposed, in the light of these essays, might Eliot s canon be to opening the door at last on A.S.J. Tessimond and Samuel Greenberg? Writing about Eliot or Baudelaire, Ford never loses sight of the slender margins between the drowned and the saved, the easy walking distance from The Waste Land to James Thomson s Victorian penny dreadful (subject of another essay), The City of Dreadful Night. 206O POETRY

103 The concept of critical discoveries has a quasi-scientific ring to it, and as he showed in Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot was happy to raid the chemistry lab in his attempts to bring an air of authority to his literary journalism. In Dark Caverns: The Correspondence of T.S. Eliot, Ford assesses the price Eliot paid for his self-transformation into the Pope of Russell Square. A reader would hardly guess he composed verse at all from surveying Eliot s letters, in all their desiccated, epic sprawl. This was the Eliot who would turn up to dinner in a four-piece suit, thought Virginia Woolf, but when Ford diagnoses a case of post-traumatic calm in Eliot s behavior he brilliantly sees past the façade, and reminds us of the personal bargain all poet-critics strike with their prose identities. For many years readers took the parsonical performance at face value but, as Ford reminds us, in reality Eliot s prose was the jungle in which the beast of his poetry could most effectively camouflage itself, hiding its private griefs and wounds in plain view. Where Ford s prose is concerned there is a deceptive mildness at work, allowing him to slip from anecdotage to the critical sucker punch without us noticing. Ford is adept at identifying the narrow margins between poetic success and failure: the unnerving continuities between Blatný the famous Czech poet and Blatný the unknown Ipswich mental patient, the contrasting fates of poor lost Samuel Greenberg and lucky lost-and-found Emily Dickinson. The question of how a critic s authority can expect to rub off on his or her poetry applies to Hofmann and Ford no less than it does to Eliot, and it would be a naive reader that did not see a large amount of critical will-to-power on show in these books, or in critical prose in general. Of Auden, a critic who turned out unfeasibly large amounts of critical prose, Stephen Spender wrote: [his] life was devoted to an intellectual effort to analyse, explain and dominate his circumstances, an effort that ended up dominating his poems into something like submission, too. More rarely, the critic will operate in a kind of holy innocent s trance of non-self-awareness. Lowell found Jarrell that rarest of things, a critic genuinely more interested in other people s work than his own, constitutionally unequipped for the self-advancing and subtle (or not so subtle) quid pro quos by which reputations are made. As with nuclear disarmament, ethical stands in poetry-reviewing work best if everyone joins in all at once, failing which Ford s fossicking on the fringes of the canon possesses enormous if vaguely somber integrity. Jarrell s principled DAVID WHEATLEY 207

104 investment in criticism may even have hastened his end: when The Lost World harvested some unkind reviews in 1965 ( the intolerable self-indulgence of his tear-jerking bourgeois sentimentality ), the already fragile Jarrell was crushed, and in October of that year walked in front of a truck. Where Have You Been? ends with an essay on Robert Walser, which notes the absurdity of commemorating a writer who walked everywhere by naming a train after him. There exists an uncanny photograph of Walser lying in the snow, dead where he fell on one of his endless tramps through the Swiss countryside. Ford and Hofmann are incomparable flaneurs, but the routes they follow from Baudelaire s Paris to Walser s Swiss asylum to Zagajewski s Lvov are something more than pit stops on a grand tour for the super-cultivated. The republic of poetry they map is a fourmillante cité, a burrow, a tower of Babel, an abandoned library, an everywhere and nowhere all at once. If annotating books is a form of mapping, the further into these two superlative books I got the more I was reminded of Borges s one-to-one map of the Empire: the most efficient response to these essays would be to trace a pencil line under every word in both. The review is the quintessential improvised form, but insofar as literary journalism can ever expect an upgrade from provisionality to permanence, it does so in volumes like Ford s and Hofmann s. I mentioned the poetry snowline. Believers in long-form literary journalism of the kind represented by these volumes have long been accustomed to breathing thinner and thinner air in search of their reclusive quarry. A look at the small print indicates that most of Ford s and Hofmann s reviews were first published in the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, New York Times, Guardian, and this magazine, but as the New Republic has recently shown, one by one the members are leaving the band. First everything migrated to blogs, then blogs gave up, and now? We ve now reached the point where, half a century overdue, a Complete Critical Prose of T.S. Eliot is happening but in the form of an online edition for which readers are charged an annual fee, as though old TLS reviews were dogs in need of regular license-renewals. We can continue this conversation on Twitter, if you fancy, but if that s where we re headed don t expect a sequel from me to Tradition and the Individual Talent anytime soon. I hope I m wrong but perhaps posterity has spoken, as that London editor liked to say. 208O POETRY

105 contributors kazim ali s books include the poetry collection Sky Ward (Wesleyan University Press, 2013) and the forthcoming essay collection Resident Alien: On Border-crossing and the Undocumented Divine (University of Michigan Press). john beer* is the author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award. He teaches at Portland State University. marianne boruch s recent collections are Cadaver, Speak (2014) and The Book of Hours (2011), both by Copper Canyon Press, which will publish Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing in garrett caples* is a poet and an editor for City Lights Books. His most recent book is a collection of essays called Retrievals (Wave Books, 2014). alan ramón clinton* is the author of Unsuccessful Love Poems (Kattywompus Press, 2015) and The Autobiography of Buster Keaton (Montag Press, 2014). He currently lives in Kuwait City. paula cunningham s* 2013 collection Heimlich s Manoeuvre (Smith/Doorstop Books) was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh, Seamus Heaney Centre, and Strong/Shine first collection prizes. kate farrell is the author of six books. Her book of poems Visiting Night at the Academy of Longing will be published by Lavender Ink in January. camonghne felix is a poet, speaker, and organizer, as well as the founder of the social justice initiative POC 4 Solvency. She is the author of the chapbook Yolk (Penmanship Books, 2015). carol frost s latest poetry collection, Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences, was published by Tupelo Press in She teaches at Rollins College and directs Winter with the Writers, a literary festival. drew gardner is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Chomp Away (Combo Books, 2010). His forth book, Defender, is forthcoming from Edge Books. He lives in New York City. CONTRIBUTORS 209

106 vona groarke has published six collections with The Gallery Press, the latest being X (2014). The current editor of Poetry Ireland Review, she teaches poetry at the University of Manchester. lisa grove* is a senior editor for the California Journal of Poetics. Her poems and translations have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Midwest Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles. frank lima* ( ) was one of the most singular and significant poets of the New York School. Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems will appear in December from City Lights Books. shane mccrae* is the author of four books, most recently The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015). He lives in Oberlin, Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College and Spalding University. eisder mosquera* is a handyman, parrot-lover, Pokémon fanatic, and an aspiring prankster who lives in Miami, Florida. les murray s recent books are Taller When Prone (2011) and Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression (2011), both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. meghan o rourke is the author of the poetry collections Once (2011) and Halflife (2007), both from W.W. Norton, and the memoir The Long Goodbye (Riverhead Books, 2011). kathleen ossip s latest book is The Do-Over (Sarabande Books, 2015). She teaches at the New School and is a founding editor of the poetry review website SCOUT. laura park* is a cartoonist and illustrator. Her work has appeared in The Best American Comics, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, and Mome. hai-dang phan* was born in Vietnam and grew up in Wisconsin. He is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College. emilia phillips is the author of Signaletics (2013) and the forthcoming Groundspeed, both from the University of Akron Press. She teaches at Centenary College and edits interviews for 32 Poems. sina queyras is the author of MxT (2014), Expressway (2009), and Lemon Hound (2006), all from Coach House Books. ed roberson* is the author of ten books of poetry. To See the Earth 210O POETRY

107 Before the End of the World (Wesleyan University Press, 2010) was runner-up for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Poetry Prize. patrick rosal s* fourth collection, Brooklyn Antediluvian, is forthcoming in He teaches at Rutgers University-Camden s MFA program. brenda shaughnessy s forthcoming collection of poetry is So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). She teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in New Jersey with her family. a.e. stallings is an American poet who has lived since 1999 in Greece. Her most recent collection is Olives (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2012). zack strait is pursuing his PhD at Florida State University and serving as Poetry Editor for BOAAT. Recent work can be found in Pleiades. charles harper webb s* latest books are Brain Camp (2015) and What Things Are Made Of (2013), both from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Webb teaches at California State University, Long Beach. david wheatley is the author of four poetry collections, including A Nest on the Waves (The Gallery Press, 2010), and the critical study Contemporary British Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). marcus wicker is the author of Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012). He s received a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from Cave Canem and the Fine Arts Work Center. He is poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review. javier zamora* was born in El Salvador and migrated to the US. He holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, and the NEA. His poems appear in Narrative, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. * First appearance in Poetry. CONTRIBUTORS 211

108 Congratulations Joshua Poteat 2015 RECIPIENT The Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry, established in 2005, is awarded each year to a poet with strong connections to the Commonwealth of Virginia. The $10,000 prize recognizes significant recent contribution to the art of poetry and a broad range of achievement in the field. PRESENTED AT THE 2015 LIBRARY OF VIRGINIA LITERARY AWARDS CELEBRATION Visit for information about previous recipients and the selection proccess. A permanent home and museum for poets and poetry, honoring the legacy of Robert Frost and encouraging the creation and appreciation of poems. The Dartmouth Poet in Residence at The Frost Place A prize of $2,000, featured readings at Dartmouth College, The Frost Place, and other local venues, and a six-to-eight week residence at Robert Frost s former home in Franconia, NH is given annually to a poet who has published at least one full-length poetry collection. The Frost Place Chapbook Contest Sponsored by Bull City Press The winner receives a $250 prize, 10 copies of a 200 print run of the selected chapbook, a full fellowship to attend The Frost Place Poetry Seminar valued at $1,500, featured reading at the Seminar, and the option to live and write for one week at The Frost Place house-museum in September 2016 during peak fall foliage. Submissions: October 1, 2015 to January 5, 2016 Reading Fee: $ ~ frost@frostplace.org ~

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110 WORKSHOPS IN POETRY, FICTION, AND PLAYWRITING JULY 19 31, 2016 THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH SEWANEE, TENNESSEE Accepting applications Jan. 15 April 15 Thanks to the generosity of the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund, supported by the estate of Tennessee Williams, every participant receives assistance. The Conference fee reflects but two-thirds of the actual cost to attend. Additional funding is awarded to fellows and scholars. RECENT FACULTY & READERS Daniel Anderson Richard Bausch John Casey Tony Earley B.H. Fairchild Daisy Foote Debora Greger Adrianne Harun Andrew Hudgins Diane Johnson Randall Kenan Margot Livesey William Logan Maurice Manning Charles Martin Jill McCorkle Alice McDermott Erin McGraw Dan O Brien Tim O Brien Wyatt Prunty Mary Jo Salter Christine Schutt A.E. Stallings Paula Vogel Sidney Wade Allen Wier Steve Yarbrough RECENT VISITORS & LECTURERS Julie Barer Millicent Bennett Paul Bone Georges and Anne Borchardt Valerie Borchardt Eliza Borné Michelle Brower Sarah Burnes MaryKatherine Callaway Polly Carl Lucas Dixon Barbara Epler Christie Evangelisto Gary Fisketjon swc@sewanee.edu sewaneewriters.org Mary Flinn Emily Forland Lindsay Garbutt Gary Garrison Rob Griffith Gail Hochman Roger Hodge Celise Kalke Mike Levine David Lynn Speer Morgan Kathy Pories Elisabeth Schmitz Don Share Charise Castro Smith Anna Stein Philip Terzian N.S. Thompson Liz Van Hoose Michael Wiegers Amy Williams Robert Wilson David Yezzi Renée Zuckerbrot