Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2016 i The American Poetry Review

Dear Chris, Life is hard. We don’t need art to say so. Life is hard. Do you know that great Dickinson line where she says she walked from “plank to plank”? Or maybe she leapt, like a flame, the light at one with the wavering scene, cryptic and serene as known emotion. Sometimes, on one of my late night experimental walks, I get the urge to smoke cigarettes and look for owls in our lush, organic, dying trees and oh yeah, revolution. Oh yeah. And the source of my sadness is . . . And the great ravines of my sadness are . . . But we have to hash it out in this world, which is bullshit, like Fiona said, in her MTV speech in the 90s, and then…

i. By evening I-85 south was a glossy tongue and the churning clouds over Greenville swallowed the sunset, a collision of slow nod and speed bag, an archetypal American pain and the lightning of the unknowable facts, the near future. Suci’s 14 and terrified of weather, I think, because she thinks it means what happens outside happens inside, too. Or vice versa. Weather in a house can low-pressure and go lower and people don’t really know how low until it’s your own lightning and facts and no one in the house can breathe; people squall each other, unknowable, and tornado the plaster walls away; she’s watched some of that weather happen and so it’s probably my fault that she’s as scared as she is of the sky. ii. 6 AM…

Mark Pawlak Reconnaissance “A consistency of vision and linguistic vigor I can only marvel at and applaud. Pawlak is among the very best poets working today,” – Pablo Medina. Of earlier work: “Marvelous poems...strange, haunting, luminous” – Hilton Obenzinger. Celebratres “how insane and touching language can be” – Kimiko Hahn. Paper, $18. Hoyt Jacobs Translating Requiem Winner of the Loose Translations Prize. Poems and translations (particularly of Anna Akhmatova) by a young Queens College graduate, who died in a bicycle accident. Paper, $18. Frances LeFevre Dearest Annie, you wanted a report on Berkson’s class Letters to Anne Waldman from her mother, wonderfully evoking the mid-Sixties downtown poetry scene. “Do we have another such mother/daughter correspondence anywhere else in the world, ever? It is wonderful stuff,” – Eileen Myles. Paper, $18.…

If you had a man, would you give him a soul— lying on the table cut and make it, beg of him to be good? I was given parents once, their houses green from timbers, cold plateaus— how light slit bedroom floorboards over decades, long surface thinly altering as one recalls there is no history not even yours, behind bushes, the glass he built the yard and on, without them— was it the quiet made them— always thinking of the war? in such stately, blameless houses, with no politics unto themselves KATE MONAGHAN is from New York City. A doctoral candidate in Chinese literature at Harvard, she has published poems in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Web Conjunctions, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.…

The flying shards of metal entered his body and the fire burned him in the flaming sea where he was flung among the living and the dead. Months then when his wounds were healing, or so it seemed, his arms splotchy, fading as the years passed, but the shrapnel stayed, in his hands, his back, little boats forever sailing in the sea of him. And the plane heading for the ship, the explosion, the blood all happened again and again. He loved to hurt, to be hurt, as if to make his almost drowning visible. And though he said he’d never hit a woman, he’d hurl an ashtray or a plate, and then he’d ask for it, right up in her face he’d say the words she hated over and…

Benefactor Igou M. Allbray Patron Robin G. Becker John Carswell Laura Baudo Sillerman Sponsor Kenneth Boockvar Carter M. Cramer Ross Gay Adil N. Godrej Anne Marie Macari Alicia Ostriker Lucy Ricciardi Jeanne Ruddy and Victor Keen Don Silver Kathryn Slott Peter Waldor and Jody Miller Supporter Anne G. Arsenault Ellen Bass Margot Berg and Robert Epstein Laurel Blossom Richard and A. Norine Bonanno Fred Brandfon William R Brennen Ira Brind John Briscoe Marianne E. Brown Deborah Burnham Ann Butchart Robert & Helen Buttel Henri Cole Brian Cronwall Carl Dennis Gregory Djanikian Owen Doyle Barbara Dunham Donald Durell Carol Eding Daniel Feinberg Jennifer Flanigan Phyllys Fleming Diane Ganiere Richard E. Getty Rayna Goldfarb Peggy Gordon Robert Hass Robert Hasselblad Nancy Mooney Hebert Martha Heyneman Brenda Hillman Mark Hillringhouse Jane B. Hirshfield…

Cento I My country untangles its horns and licks its own agave. II We might meet at a table with fresh grapes, with the top of my head overflowing. We speak of quiet things and these things quiet me all the long silver way. We walk in our own gardens which could be a shared garden. III To be in love and to accept so little of the world. I knew that someone might govern the mailroom moon. IV A teacher once told me to beware of the first person. The little girl voice. V Maybe I have many novels, maybe I have many arms. I had determined that I should have many arms. My hair would be sea-green and I would write my myth in squid ink. It would…

She has the colour of my eye, She has the body of my hand —Paul Eluard, trans. Samuel Beckett She has the Kansas City of my open window She has the halogen of my bent blinds And her hair is in my hair She has the fresh breeze of my borrowed flower sheets She has the freestyle of my squeaky metal bed coils She has the sonic boom of another’s blood beneath me She has Any way you want it that’s the way you need it outside her window in the summer dark And her hair is in my hair She has the breaking point of my hard plastic pink flipflops She has the hypnosis of my shuffle to the kitchen to make coffee She has the conversation of my…

Fumbling forward in an arrogant fog. The sensation of tiredness—tingle smell of swallowed coffee in the nose is tiny, like Captain Cook’s ship picking the edge of Australia. He and my nose are determined nits. Something eternal’s surely obscured—? The mouth-covering submission of having a vagina, of looking at the sky and desiring another order, or not desiring another order (to be delivered by Cook or by nose) but understanding the ridiculous fear that animates the oppressor so small in a big space. The memory of my father at the drive-thru window of a McDonald’s at night on I-87 north, his face lit and strained serious, is easy to describe, whereas someone else’s foam earphones, or a soft anxiety that wants you to lie in it, or the mountains at…

GET TING OFF THE PLANE IN NEWARK, New Jersey, a few years ago, before the Dodge Poetry Festival, I looked for the car service hired to transport poets to the festival grounds. It turned out I was riding in the same car as ________, a Native American poet, whom I had not met before. “Oh, it’s nice to meet you,” I said. “You and I are on the same panel on Sunday—“‘Poets on Race in Poetry.’” Although she and I look pretty much the same—we both could pass for Minnesotans— she looked at me like I was crazy, and burst into laughter. “What race are you?” she said. ________’s assumption, one shared by most Americans, is that white skin color is disconnected from racial identity. Whiteness is the background against…

Track How trees end at one curve in the track where horses famously race and I took my bike, dodging pines, maples up to the fence that divides the washed from the unwashed, those who pay and who don’t but my front tire doesn’t nuzzle each stake and crosswire like a colt would, can’t nibble grass. Nothing doing today, too early in the season plus the gloom of about-to-rain dims it all down. The stalls, they back into these woods too, and one dejected teenager part-timing it, about to walk a filly past the bright red cold drink machine, no doubt having rubbed her shiny, speaking out of his sullen thought-balloon sweet to this god bred for perfect and beautiful and quick. It’s not sentimental. They’re meant to the bone…

Nothing Nothing flagrant, nothing on fire: I thought I might be dead. But I was dead calm, a Tibetan Buddhist, not the kind from Connecticut with a secret lust for cash. This once a sheltered cove sent me the gift of stillness. It almost seemed a crime to breathe. Then my cottage had to be filled with joy. A Haydn symphony. I trimmed fresh asparagus, poured a wine, all floral and mineral. And the tulips I planted last fall, their bouquet was bounty for my Chinese vase. I needed a whole city, or some mountain town to arrive by donkey. It was Italy all right, with olive groves and the kind of summer heat that pressed your cheeks like a mother’s palm. Not the mother I was given, not the…

A student, Naema, calls in from Kalamazoo and tells the authors of the featured book that when she studied the triangle trade in school she imagined a continent populated by slaves: children literally born in cages who waited for their masters to claim them. In the green light of the dash, my wife snorts, a sound she makes whenever she hears a statement so absurd it might be true, and the esteemed professor emeritus from Hull admits the student’s right, though only partly, citing the countless thousands taken captive by rival tribes (endemic ethnic warfare), how they worked the land of their enemies and were sold for rifles, rum, calico. “For real?” Naema says. She sounds so young. Her voice has a raspy aspect as she questions why Africans would…

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Yehuda Amichai, The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015 Chana Kronfeld, The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Stanford University Press, 2016 THE APPEARANCE OF THE POETRY OF YEHUDA AMICHAI, EDITED by Robert Alter, could not be more relevant, published at a time when many people are distressed over prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and when violent religious extremism risks the spread of war across several regions. Throughout his career Yehuda Amichai (1924– 2000) was hailed as the national poet of Israeli identity, beloved as the most important Jewish poet since Paul Celan, even as his poems elegantly undercut nationhood, political rhetoric, and religious faith. I have always read him as one of those poets who arrive to…

It makes me sad to look up at the crest of a building & see washed-out names, decals, numbers, lettering half-gone, muted tinges of the past, edges of lives discolored & flaking off signs, the bold signatures now silenced & mildewed a hundred times in gray. I see them come & go, new faces with question marks & dollar signs in their eyes, believing they can still birth the Immaculate. But I know when the heart’s only a big mouth & the pumping is not a cutting contest at Slug’s. A paint job has taken away patinas of years, romance, & chance. I have stumbled upon a thing that stuns me beneath a busted light globe. Even if loneliness arrives around 3 a.m., it isn’t easy to touch myself because…

-Nation (an excerpt) 7. There was a space on my shoulders where he liked to rest his face. His hair soft under my jaw. After the shots, his senses raced into overdrive—lights too bright, songs too loud, my touch too much. The last time he hugged me back was in the waiting room. He was two. He’d been sick and missed some shots, so the clinic played catch-up. I guess it was more than he could take. We just wanted to prepare for daycare, all vaccines up to date. Now they won’t take him. The doctors say he’ll need an institution. At night, I sneak into his room when I’m sure he’s asleep just to rest my cheek against his darkening curls and breathe the scent of him. NOTES Location:…

I READ MALACHI BLACK’S DEBUT, Storm Toward Morning, while nursing my third child. In a sea of breastfeeding manuals and pass-thetime novels this collection was a welcome reprieve. Perhaps “reprieve” gives the wrong impression, though: what I mean is that it awakened my capacity to think; these are intense poems that deal with bodily sickness, the struggle of spirit and flesh, and the absence and existence of God. Black has been called a “John Donne for the Millennial age,” and a metaphysical sensibility does indeed inform the shape and straining of the poems. “I am as a nerve inside a gland,” he writes, “I understand. / Though I am fashioned / as I am, I am a perch for the eternal / and a purse for what it lends.” The…

Bollingen, 1949 It’s a year I remember like no other, the year I sided with that cold man and with the committee and pitied him in his tent in the hot sun in the freezing rain one book only allowed. It’s as if he were locked up in a hotel and all he had was a Gideon and he was stuck for a year in Kings and Ephesians. Oh to be in England now that Winston’s out now that there’s room for doubt and the bank shall be the nation’s. Jews, Jews, Jews, voted against him and they sold the prize to the least bidder. Earth receive an honest guest, lucky those who were laid to rest. No One No one there to remember with me the election returns of…

Funny Poems I am trying to trust comedy, but it’s not enough, it’s not intrinsically beautiful, it’s not always out of love, whom does it heal, how does it redeem? Funny matters, and it means, but not when merely an excuse. It’s more, I suspect, like slamming a closet door as soon as I catch sight of myself in the full-length mirror. There, bam. There, bam, There, bam. I’m seven, or maybe six— there, bam—and then my terrifying uncle arrives and bellows, WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THAT DOOR? and pinches me from the room. I had, of course, already tied together all of his shoes, a dozen pairs knotted in the closet in a dense clump, like some weird asteroid. The funny part was done: I hid under the…

Duras: Mystic Of Christ, she writes, “Like the love of Christ or of J.S. Bach—the two of them breathtakingly equivalent.” Of the Old Testament, she writes, “The Text of Texts is the Old Testament.” Of God and alcohol she writes: “Alcohol doesn’t console, it doesn’t fill up anyone’s psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God.” M.D.’s sense of the absence of God is common among saints and believers. To notice the lack of God is to sense the place or space He would be. It is to believe, in the first place. This lack is, of course, noticeable only by those who believe. One cannot notice the absence of something they do not anticipate. The absence of God is the shadow of God. Duras: The Mute The…