Innholdsfortegnelse for March - April 2015 i The American Poetry Review

I Mistyped “Jump” and so saw, as if risen up from a kind of community plasm, how the rage my body shares with the rest of the species, a blanketing crimson rage, a dagger-shape of rage, the kind that seized control of Allie J on finding her man in the back booth with Yolanda and resulted in a bottle in her fist and (from her man) a torn aorta and (Yolanda) a muddle of teeth and blood on the floor is also the rage—the same splenetic haze and dagger— that drives the warriors, crazy for death, with death in their hearts, with crazy in their hearts, to the enemy village, over the wall of thorns around its kraal, half-a-planet away from Bobby’s Beer & Billiards on South Sixteenth. Also, the…

It’s the corporeal feelings I crave the most: aridity, lust, their aches’ redaction, love-weariness, kiss-quest, falling in bed again when loneliness breaks a sweat and we mount a horse called faith borne on this wheel of March, charge and stamping heat of the noble night that will carry us, tongue and thigh entwined and shuddering against our own coming history. MICHELLE BITTING has work published in Prairie Schooner, Narrative, The Paris-American, diode, Manor House Quarterly, L.A. Weekly and others. Her book Good Friday Kiss won the DeNovo First Book Award, and Notes to the Beloved received a starred Kirkus review.…

she said I what will I say. what not. II can you see through walls and doors? I wish that I were. empty. of memory. III dream: a man asks me to choose. do I want to lose one eye or one hand. I think. I can draw with one eye. it would be too difficult without my hand. I choose an eye. he laughs. he cuts off my hand. IV I think towards the time I will see you when I think I think you hear me V you are a mirror sometimes a comfort sometimes I am tired of looking but I’m alive as long as you are still alive VI sometimes my photographs know more than I do. they look at me. and often. I still don’t…

SPRING 2015 ASALI SOLOMON Thursday, March 19, 2015 7 p.m., Location TBD Asali Solomon received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and was selected as a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” for the short stories in her debut collection Get Down, which was also featured as “This Week’s Must Read” on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Her debut novel, Disgruntled, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in February 2015. Stories and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, and several anthologies. She teaches literature and fiction writing at Haverford College. ELISE JUSKA Thursday, April 16, 2015 7 p.m., Location TBD Elise Juska’s 2014 novel The Blessings was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and chosen for Entertainment Weekly’s “Must…

I’ve stopped my work to write letters to the weeds I’ve yet to. Bend if you’re lonely tonight. Because this is the first garden that I’ll build without my dog beside me. I’m not sure what separates the things we keep and don’t keep. A soccer ball that rattles the fence and the neighbor’s music of accordions has taken her place. But my hand still reaches down for her. Has the squawk of the crows kept you nervous? And I didn’t know what the larva was, so I pinched it between my fingers until its milky insides burst white onto me. I suppose we’re all wary of what comes next. All day I’ve worked the soil, tomorrow I’ll build the boxes. I’ll show you the plans I’ve drawn up and…

AT A 2011 NAT IONAL Book Award event, in the half-full auditorium of the New School in New York City, commemorative of the NBA’s 50th anniversary, a panel met to discuss, in public, the aesthetic “track record” of the NBA poetry awards. The panel included Susan Stewart, James Longenbach, Stephen Burt, Elizabeth Alexander, myself, and Maureen McClane. In some ways this event was an occasion of justified self-celebration—over fifty years, a surprising number of groundbreaking collections of American poetry have been selected by the NBA; choices that represent the insight and sometimes even the daring of past NBA committees. Past winners have included such unpredictable and groundbreaking texts as Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, Robert Bly’s The Light Around the Body, as well as collections by William Bronk and…

Racetrack Velvet and shit: I summoned it and come it did. The horses’ flanks are rank with sweat and flies and I remember you between my legs achieving for an hour or so. We parted on the best of terms: the sweet unsayable loss that’s gain in drag. The day hurt a little brighter for all that sharpening. I have a turnstile heart; it opens madly and shuts just so. In morning cold, the horses’ breath takes on the shape of terrible blooms. The hoof-stamps sound less urgently. I’m not talking about my heart. Safehouse Despite lightning, despite god rearranging his furniture, I feel safe as houses. When houses were safe: from mudslides, arson, quakes. Houses were never safe, I suppose, from human intent or force of nature, only the…

“AND SO IT WAS ALL OVER,” THE GREAT visionary Black Elk says in his account of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. “I did not know then how much was ended.”1 Wounded Knee, where the United States Seventh Cavalry killed 150 noncombatant Sioux men, women and children, was, of course, not the only massacre in the four-hundred-year history of the white-Indian wars. It was only one of the last in the legacy of violent conquest and attempted genocide, both physical and cultural, that haunts any real understanding of what it means to be an American. As historian Patricia Nelson Limerick writes, in an essay entitled “Haunted America,” it is the foundation that “our presence on this continent rests on.”2 Every inch of earth, after forty thousand years of occupation, is…

Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 Vivas to those who have fail’d! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known! —Walt Whitman I. The Red Flag The newspapers said the strikers would hoist the red flag of anarchy over the silk mills of Paterson. At the strike meeting, a dyers’ helper from Naples rose as if from the steam of his labor, lifted up his hand and said here is the red flag: brightly stained with dye for the silk of bow ties and scarves, the skin and fingernails boiled away for six…

What does the light want? More of its kind? Yes. Yes and a wish to disturb the dark. {introduction} Whether air- or waterborne, in dark or dusk— whether to scare off or entice— a million things radiate to radiant the self: a beetle hovers above knotty foliage flickering for a mate; a dragon-fish dangles dots of light trailing from its chin to lure prey to its fearsome teeth; the squid’s ambiguous sparkle —luminous bacteria in its light organ— presents uncanny disguise; the bombardier worm when attacked fires off its gills, a bright green bomb, so predators get a mouthful of bioluminescent blob instead of meal: yes to tactical diversion! yes to traffic signal! flood-light over crime scene! bright feast! dazzling come-on! Yes, to the opposite of obscure. {Flashlight Fish} After…

Temperance Something something tower and some swords, then a lobster. I didn’t hear much before I gave in to summer. The picnic was too sweet, many cakes, sparkling rose, floral paper plates. Too near, his teeth, too gold to stay away from my mouth. We ate each other outdoors, of course it was vulgar. Delicious too, Pan piping sex music, bobbing bass, chiming flute. The truth is I willfully got drunk too quick to clock much of anything the seer saw before she packed up her patchwork tent and left. Whatever destruction will come will come with warning or without. Forgive me for preferring this version of the banquet of sorrow, not somber red wine, roast meats, silver plates, but not knowing, for now, and cake and cake and cake.…

Mattress We wrapped it in plastic and strapped it with duct tape; we wrestled it out to the curb where, dusted with snow, it slumped like a body the garbagemen fed to the maw of a truck that they drove out the tunnel, to Jersey, to the dump where a thousand gulls keened, hovering over that map of old stains where we’d dreamt and read and made love— where we sweated out fevers, and fought, and gave up, and once gazed at our blinking three-day-old babies, never thinking it would end full of maggots and fleas, full of suckling rats and blind moles, or whatever out there sleeps where we slept, as it sloughs its guts into the dirt. Five Haiku My father grunts What the fuck you want? fists…

Monochrome The day I learned my wife was dying it was September. Trees were green, now they turned brown; flowers dimmed; to recall their color seemed a mockery. This was the first of the changes, then came the slow shift to monochrome, as all of nature commenced to bleed out and take on the face of overcast sky. Unaccountably, people kept walking around. They shopped; they partied. I called to them: Hide in your basements! Try to stay warm! Some laughed; some scratched their heads. Then I knew the world wasn’t broken; my eyes were broken. Song The day I learned my wife was dying is farther away than the fall of Rome and as close as the next second. It’s dread promise fills every moment. Birds mouth their songs;…

It’s easier to computer than to crash. It’s easier to computer than to hold a hand or knit a winter together from headlights on the highway. It’s easier to computer and be a hybrid and cross from bowels and eardrums into hours lit and roaring by like freight. The chapters there can tell you an octopus has three hearts, that snails breathe through their feet. It is easier to have no arms or breath, to position through colors and jumps shoreless as steam. No surfaces. No verbs to be. No mussels or bellows or congestion or caffeine. No lens to focus, no Rome to burn. Who can do when the roots are so untidy and the branches rack like antlers against other branches. It’s easier to computer than to guess…

Object Permanence [ for John] We wake as if surprised the other is still there, each petting the sheet to be sure. How have we managed our way to this bed—beholden to heat like dawn indebted to light. Though we’re not so self-important as to think everything has led to this, everything has led to this. There’s a name for the animal love makes of us—named, I think, like rain, for the sound it makes. You are the animal after whom other animals are named. Until there’s none left to laugh, days will start with the same startle and end with caterpillars gorged on milkweed. O, how we entertain the angels with our brief animation. O, how I’ll miss you when we’re dead. In Igboland After plagues of red locusts…

This interview took place on March 23, 2014, in Martín Espada’s study at his home in Amherst, Massachusetts, a month after his father, Frank Espada, the eminent photographer and community activist, died of heart disease in San Francisco. CHARD DENIORD A lot of people know who you are from your poetry, but would you mind starting by talking about your early formative years in Brooklyn, specifically what it was like growing up there in the late fifties and sixties? You didn’t start out as a poet, but your childhood experience in East New York informs a lot of your work. MARTÍN ESPADA I was born and raised in the East New York section of Brooklyn in 1957, and grew up in the Linden projects. My father was from Puerto Rico.…

IN THE OPENING PAGES OF CLAUDIA RANkine’s tour de force Citizen: An American Lyric, she writes: You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a per- son of color when there are so many great writ- ers out there. You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having. Why do you feel comfortable saying this to me?1 In this moment the reader is presented with an overwhelming sense of paradox. We assume that the identity of the speaker mirrors that of the author, a Black woman, a prominent writer and professor, a…

You and the song had gone But the melody lingers on —Irving Berlin I write speech, you wrong speech. Charlie Chan say: Good proposal like egg ready to hatch: mind yoke. Old age is nothing to write home about. Home is where the heart was. Poetry makes music with the words alone. No use not crying over spilt kreplach. Repetition is nine tenths of the law. No future is so yesterday. Past perfect, future perfect, present tense. The faces in the poem are imaginary but the feelings are fantasy. My head is bloodied and bowed. Shudders shut and shudders open and so do prawns. I want to be not the person I am but the one I amn’t. I used to have heartstrings but now down to one, which works…