“Our American culture has no poetry written into its origin. We inherited our poetry—mostly hymns and heroic couplets—from England, and we’ve tended, since the onset of the Industrial Age, to regard the medium itself as superfluous or frivolous, if not dangerous.”
An Interview with Stanley Kunitz Read More »
A few years ago, a woman in Spain attempted to restore a nineteenth-century church fresco, but in doing so ruined it completely. The result is less Savior than surreal simian, the delicate portrait painted over with a crude, monstrous “face.” Since the election it has been hard to shake the feeling that reality has been made worse, unrecognizable, in precisely this way.
Ears on the Floor: Poetry of Witness in a Post-Truth Era Read More »
When I was seven years old, the INS raided the canyon behind my childhood home in San Diego. I remember how they pulled up onto our driveway and men emerged in uniforms with large guns.
Let It Begin with Me Read More »
Tangled against the river the red-gray thump of the feet of deer in the half-frozen mud and the sear of dry branches torn from the living, a yellow-orange strip of barkless wood on the trunk and the tender wet where the branch was torn crystallizing in the cold, and trees like a mesh of black oil.
“Hill,” by Margaret Reges Read More »
In 1974, the year Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment, my father, a man with rabbinic aspirations, was deep in his own pickle, indicted for conspiracy and fraud in the federal summer school lunch program.
“Deep Throat,” by Pearl Abraham Read More »
“The concept of snapping and committing violence under pressure isn’t foreign to us, but the people who were snapping–namely, young children, including girls–surprised me.”
On “Pull Me Under”: An Interview with Kelly Luce Read More »
On September 30, I received an email from my neighbor that our apartment building had caught on fire.
“I’m not sure that Burn Lyrics is, strictly speaking, ‘in conversation with’ either Carson or Sappho. The model I have in mind is more like concomitant dimensions. I hope that a reader might experience a frisson of recognition, an emotional yet perhaps unplaceable feeling, when those dimensions overlap or communicate with one another.”
On “Burn Lyrics”: An Interview with Benjamin Landry Read More »
It seemed almost a joke those first few days, / our handsome soldiers yawning with ennui. / When Bismarck sneered “The Paris bourgeoisie / will break after a day without eclairs,” / we laughed. Then had a day without eclairs.
“Madame L. Describes the Siege of Paris,” by Beth Ann Fennelly Read More »
In 1872, Susan B. Anthony cast a ballot in the presidential election in which Ulysses S. Grant would win his second term in office. Nearly half a century before women would actually get the right to vote in this country, this was of course an illegal act, and one for which Anthony was ultimately arrested and tried.
The Only Question Left To Be Settled Now Read More »
