Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2015 i The American Poetry Review

Between the Tongue and the Warm Salt Dearling. Sweatheart. In the quantum spaces between words people understand each other. They meet in a central square and have a hot pretzel. They taste the same salt. Don’t be scared because we are ghosts to each other. I’m sorry I will leave you. Put your finger inside me. Taste my salt. We snap at each other while bombs kill people elsewhere. You put a skirt and ride your bicycle away. I’m sorry! I shout. When you turn around at the corner and start riding back, two journals will merge: the one I’m writing now, from birth to death, and the one my life’s writing backwards. Their lines appear to cross but a scientist would see space howling between the tongue and the…

Mount Pleasant All night, six vagrants stood at our stoop chewing the fat out of a too stout story. She did this, did that, took that, she never, never, never, never, never, . . . A white fluttering, a thought, like headlights from a passing car, lights up this room where I’ve never been restful, never still. Outside, the buses must be un-routing. I hear their slow-going screech round the corner, engines dying. My neighbor’s a dinosaur, Bonnie, she’s lived here since the commune days, eats hemp seeds, I bet, always nods at me. It’s not her out there, but she’s in my head, the lonely field I imagine each night, awake again nowhere else to go. Never is a strange design, to name what can’t be or won’t begin.…

Upon the Relinquishment of a Shelter Dog She cannot say dog. The oval bed is empty now, she needs it empty. She chooses not to free its zipper’s snagging tooth. She will not speak the nickname summoning the loll of solace, damp of tongue. Now the wind is her familiar, and a hand (the hand he liked to nuzzle) does its best to soothe her brow (kneads the crease that’s deepened there) while the other takes her glasses off, turns out the light. She will not think the word. The realms of bowl are void of water, kibble. They must be thus. She does not think of collars smartly fastened, of tags’ muffled bells, of leashes that seemed brighter in the falling snow. She cannot choose a door to leave…

1. The world has always been ending, I said. And you said: Yes. Today, half-lost on the senderos, among its dry brush and thorns, I hear my mother’s voice in the rocks—see in the rust plains and lava bulbs and cairns stacked as markers her cells massing upon her heart, lungs, running riot along her sternum. Soon, the nights of marrow-talk, of jabs and the Seven Last Words. Serum nights with viols, the Joyful Mysteries, thumbs on decades falling asleep. I light a match with the end of another, warm poisons and gauze for the new year. 2. The world has always been ending, she said. And I said: Yes. Today we walk bearing hymnals and lilacs for the gazebo green, for stairwells and chalks drawn to mark the hem…

It was intra-squad, not a real game, but teenage boys don’t know the difference; and to the pitcher who’d just thrown an adrenaline-powered fastball at my head, I was a pretender he could intimidate. And when the next pitch nearly took off the top of my left knee, I knew, with all the force of a mystical vision, this talented boy, this ace of the staff, a senior expected to bloom after showing such promise last year, such grit, such competitive fire, would fail. I saw it in his eyes when I got back up; I saw the momentary hesitation, the confusion. I knew the next pitch would be right down the center of the plate, and as fast as all the pride in his body could muster. And he…

elegy one now I am reading from Berg’s “Dōgen Versions” I’m old Some nameless creature moans was was was was was Maybe from a tree maybe in the sky Maybe me in the next-to-last line, somewhere near the edge of the word sky I begin to waken— a small, winged creature has landed on the white sand of the page margin. Casually, seeking to free it, I sweep with my hand, sweep it into the page. Staring, not believing, still thinking I can free it, I sweep again, spread it further. Permanent. Not fixable. Silent I become, the way I always am in the long presence of another’s death. Evening has darkened, grown cool. September. I will go from this bench, maybe he will be there elegy two in the…

My desire was greater than any other person’s desire, but I was connected to all other people through it. I abstracted it from the particulars of my life so that others might recognize it close to home. Free from those false details I found it taking its own shape but still stuck to me in places like a falcon struggling on flypaper. I wanted to free myself from it too since I was now the most limiting factor but was afraid I wouldn’t survive the hurt, or that I’d become unrecognizable to the people I knew. If I didn’t act, however, ligatures were threatening to pull me across a threshold I hadn’t chosen. That was all yesterday. This morning I find myself in more or less the same dilemma except…

Ode to Those Who Study the Miasmas Praise all who wade into the swamp, rubber pants up to their waists, anti-venom in a phial around their necks, each with a pencil, a machete. The pencil for notes—what went wrong here, there, everywhere. You know what the machete does. The miasmatists try to find the root beginning at the end of where the root reaches. They sometimes die doing this: passing out food to the starving, the line so long they starve before it ends. They try to understand the world’s malice. Why one man smells a stink on another. Why a man (his grandfather before him, his son to succeed him) pie-charts the decades, the centuries, of blood-feud. The miasmatists stab a microscope into a living louse to count the…

What is wanted : to be scrubbed bone raw (they do it to the brides). Uneasy, this abiding of what cannot be removed. Skin troubles— a hand might sand me finely down (had I not amputated it). Briefly, I’ve forgotten the whole face of my desire : to slough off not mere extremity—but every part belonging to the air 0. This is not a sonnet 1. When I paint a square around a sphere you 2. pivot, cornered, and we have what is called 3. incompatible dimension. Fitting is a decision: what 4. volumes will I remove to swim beneath us 5. now, how surface? Failing to emerge, any stroke 6. becomes “stroke.” Eureka is the loud method 7. by which action is displaced with distraction. We 8. were supposed…

We are not witches as fable stoops us hunchback over caldrons, not women hobbled sinister by absence though we know there are tides in our blood that lean us toward some ancient clock. Still if ox marrow soup is suggested, the pot readies and if we return from the Chinese market with a rough bag of earth tea, our house steeps in the dank reduction of bark and root, cold air cut heavy with mist. We may have eaten goose eggs, raw garlic and sweetbreads, charged our bathwater with carnelian and held our noses as we threw back shots of chlorophyll and kombucha. We may have made closet altars, placed bowls of royal pollen beneath our beds and because someone swore it worked, our underwear may have all gone orange,…

A Special APR Supplement The poems in this selection all appear in What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, just published by Copper Canyon Press. Editor Michael Wiegers notes: Many of Stanford’s unpublished poems were organized by the poet into manuscripts of varying sizes. I’ve attempted to present the poems as the poet apparently wanted them to be gathered. However, numerous poems that appear in these manuscripts also feature in the books, sometimes in slightly different versions. Plain Songs gathers “versions” and “improvisations” influenced by the poems of Jean Follain. Schoolboys and Their Hound For the hell of it the schoolboys break the ice on the pond near the tracks they’re all bundled up in army greens stained with axle grease and dove blood and chalk and cum their…

When I read that architect Sinan had left a message in a bottle telling restorers how to build again the arches of the mosque that he knew would fall into decay, I thought, maybe I should do that for my poems— not because poets 400 years from now will want to write poems like mine the way architects 400 years from then would want to build mosques like Sinan’s, but so I can know how to write those poems myself, starting, say, tomorrow morning, since most days I feel as though poem writing is something I’ve never actually done before and certainly don’t know how to begin doing today, that is, tomorrow morning. Here’s the story: in the early nineties, an engineer in Istanbul was trying to figure out how…

Jesus said to me Did you mean to draw some moral from your own life, how you found love so late? How though you weren’t patient, weren’t kind, in pursuit were ruthless, it was given to you anyway? Though that story’s not done, not proven, you have some wisdom to share with the loveless now, do you, something they should or shouldn’t do? The gay boy, the raped girl, the libeled widow (Jesus now resting his abraded hand on the book)? Go ahead then, speak. Promise them something. Jesus said A program remembers, doesn’t it, where you stopped watching the movie, where you clicked off those books before shutting off the light. Other programs remember your searches, your queue, passwords, complaints, the wallpaper you chose, how loud, how bright you…

I’ll go back to scalding baths and adding weight to the bar until my muscles ache. Already she’s begun to shake her head when the kisses get too heavy. She’s not in the mood. I kiss her when I lift her off the floor, and while I walk with her on my hip, and after I click the buckles on the carseat. The dentist said I must clench my teeth at night. Once she she mentioned it, I realized I’m clenching them all the time, whenever I give the baby a kiss. The beginning of love for her father is the only comparison I can make. I couldn’t walk down the street without trying to put my arms around him. I needed to reach across the table and touch the…

Trouble Poem Every time the phone rings I think I’m in trouble. I’m in the stolen Honda again. I’m out in the park scratching my name into the picnic table with a pocket knife while my classmates get their diplomas. I’m falling backwards through the fog, pulled into it chin over finger over ribs over tongue, pried from the door jamb, dragged through the living room and the kitchen into the boulevard of trouble. It’s my mother calling. It’s the principal. It’s the cops shining their heavy flashlights through the windows of my mistakes. I want to say that I never run, that when trouble finds me I reach for the phone like a man who wants to stare his behavior in the face. I pull on my goggles and…

LATELY, THE WORD EXTINCTION FLOATS AROUND IN MY INTERIOR conversations, spurred most obviously by environmental destruction, endless and senseless wars, and of course my own awareness of personal mortality. In the trips I’ve made over the last five years to see the Ice Age painted caves in France and Spain, art that’s between 10,000 and 40,000 years old, I saw the astounding cave Rouffignac, known as Cave of a Hundred Mammoths, where artists painted and engraved those great creatures, a trail of mammoths throughout the enormous tunnels. Whatever we have left of these beings seems precious. The startling depictions of the extinct mammals remind me that our ancestors coexisted with them and it was thrilling to be so near the art made by those who had studied and hunted the…

Mama Money This tax season I pledge my allegiance to taxation without representation, or according to your tax bracket, representation without taxation, since, man, we all need to make more money from what little money we make. Sure, I’ll open my checkbook to the routing number in the bottom left followed by my social security number which is neither secure nor social, then the phone number of all the children in our household as opposed to the number of adults who are not, the number of pills we take each morning to make sure we keep both straight, the number per day or per week or per month I fuck and for how long or well because I understand my patriotic obligation for full disclosure, my national duty to maintain…

What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, Ed. Michael Wiegers, Copper Canyon Press, 2015, 747 pages Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives, Ed. Michael Wiegers and Chet Weise, Third Man Books, 2015, 120 pages I. “[T]onight the gars on the trees are swords in the hands of knights,” declares poet Frank Stanford’s unique contribution to American letters: the swashbuckling, clairvoyant “little outlaw” Francis Gildart, unlikely knight and adolescent hero of Stanford’s visionary mock-epic poem of roughly 15,000 lines, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Stanford’s alter ego (who pointedly shares the author’s first and middle given names) narrates his quest through a stream-of-consciousness mode in which anecdotal lists of action mix with lyrical dream interludes, both of which aim to characterize Francis’s multitudinous self (a…

JAY WRIGHT’S LATEST COLLECTION, Disorientations: Groundings (2013), provides his most serious readers with an opportunity to take stock of the latest stage in his well-established career. Critics such as Harold Bloom and John Hollander place him among major American poets, and he has won a series of distinguished awards. Yet Wright’s poetic corpus has not occupied center stage in either American or African American literary circles. Few present African American critics have—as did the late Nathan Scott, Jr.—cultivated the Anglo-European traditions of Romantic, post- Romantic, and high modernist traditions in which Wright’s verse is situated. One would have liked Wright’s verse to be placed where it belongs: in the authentic literary canons of post-Romanticism elaborated by Scott in The Poetics of Belief and Visions of Presence in American Poetry. As…

FRANK BIDART WAGERS THAT TITLING a poem “My Mother’s Nipples,” as Robert Hass did, doesn’t make it confessional (“The Journey”). It seems a rather obvious point: writing about “mom” doesn’t lock a poet into the confessional mode. But the self-consciousness about confession, the preoccupation with the fundamental mother-child relationship, and the enmeshing of personal crises with philosophical inquiry that would lead a poet to thematize his mother’s nipples suggest its engagement with post-confession. Bidart’s “Confessional” also evokes confessional poetry while dodging the worst charge against it—that it lacks craft1—by developing metaphysical concerns, abstractions, and literary presences alongside a narrative about one’s mother. The poem wrestles with the literary history of men with mother issues, puzzling over Saint Augustine’s tyrannical mother, Monica, who can finally die once her son stops sowing…

XVII There’s a painting in which Christ is tied to a marble pillar, while three men stand aside, paying no attention to the little, two-tailed whip, no longer than the whipper’s forearm, raised to strike. And there’s another painting of a battle in which men killing and men dying stare into each other’s eyes not in hatred or enmity but immense resignation, as if saying, This is what is and I know it can’t be otherwise. The only one showing emotion is a horse baring its teeth, the splayed hairs of its long tail flecked ornately with spots of blood. And there’s a painting of a woman who’s supposed to be a whore, her wet hair on her shoulders painted strand by strand, her shoulders and neck big and sturdy.…