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Vernal Equinox
i. Distant shit and wet moss laced through what winter’s left: radiated rain, warped window sill, wind-seething eucalyptus. ii. Ocean-shoved cumulus cloud incises horizon held by hills and radio towers’ red volleyed lights. iii. As if to pin a thought to the back of my skull a humming- bird pivots, glares through me — its […]
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Gustaf Sobin, Collected Poems
Gustaf Sobin. Collected Poems, edited by Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron, Andrew Zawacki, and Edward Foster. Talisman House, 2010. A poet of spectacular deliberateness, Gustaf Sobin transformed the ode into language captured in time-lapse. Reading this carefully assembled Collected Poems, published in 2010 by Talisman House, we come into contact with a mind capable of totally […]
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Second Amanita Ode
Coils in a silo in cavernous open space downward sloping lined with aluminum panels crosshatched with grids; a hum. A droning range. Tuned to the key of E. And a glare of light. Intensifying a holy living form in the nave of the silo. No secret for the poet-priests. What is it? Wondrous. Wall of […]
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The Future of Illusions: Leopardi’s Canti
Canti, Giacomo Leopardi | Translated by Jonathan Galassi | Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010 Whether one prefers Longfellow’s version of the Inferno, or Ciaran Carson’s, one knows Dante’s name, as one knows the names Baudelaire and Goethe. Introducing his Leopardi: Selected Poems, Eamon Grennan is blunt: “mention the name Leopardi to ten educated people (poets included) […]
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Going on where hope and desire have been left behind is a discipline.
in pain, I don’t experience pain as repetition though I’ve knelt into nausea this way before and bent, reminiscent of prayer or surrender like looking again at Agnes Martin’s The Beach the texture of a tissue protecting an engraving pain touches the mind with a similar distance entirely prepositional, dependent on proximity an order bordering […]
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Behind and before self-expression is a developing awareness in the mind that effects the work.
white unrented room before I write the poem it’s a wall or its image projected wavering it remains distant when thinking enters the image as sound a gorgeous torching where my eye was I put my ear to see the current burn in the poem open filament trembling wattage for Peter O’Leary
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This developing awareness I will also call “the work.” It is a most important part of the work.
I look at paintings I work on another poem Agnes Martin made with a ruler and pencil and I think about compulsory repetition the grid as endgame helpless entrapment not a spiritual practice or meditative lyric but the mind’s limit iterated constantly I know she believed satisfaction impossible art is better hungry but I remember […]
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Koch’s Bones
A stretched head with Formidable jaws, A series of ribs forming A large ovoid body and The vestiges of flippers Arranged in undulating shape, One hundred fourteen feet in length, Those bones Dr. Koch Displayed in the Apollo Saloon, Broadway 1845, Hydragos Sillimanii, or Silliman’s master-of-the-seas, Its head raised into position — “Dr. Koch, this […]
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George Oppen’s “If It All Went Up In Smoke” and Primitive: A Comparative Study
In a 1962 letter to his half-sister June Degnan, poet George Oppen laments that now that he is fifty-three years old; he has at most another twenty years of active writing ahead of him. As far as he is concerned, he tells Degnan, it is sufficient time in which to achieve what he set out […]