Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2016 i The American Poetry Review

Losing Language 1. Men in their fifties find themselves wandering What it means to be displaced by another, to be ecstatic sometimes in everyday ways I wanted him as my companion There was no place in which he wanted to be, so traveling was a labor If I lived with him I would never leave She said I looked as if I had fallen in love It was true, but not the way she imagined 2. I was less sad about his death than moved by his life Displaced What it means to be ecstatic I asked him to tell me about the other side Which one, he said 3. Any life can be if it is lived In some brain injuries, the afflicted becomes less fluent, less able under…

AP2 Books Collected Poems: 1950–2012 by Adrienne Rich W. W. Norton 1216 pages, $60 hardcover, 2016 i. “without the other end”: An Introduction In the “Introduction” to her first volume of collected poems, Collected Early Poems: 1950–1970, published in 1993, Adrienne Rich looked back on the beginnings of her career as a poet: “I was like someone walking through a fogged-in city, compelled on an errand she cannot describe . . . holding one end of a powerful connector, useless without the other end.” The powerful connecter could be understood alternatively as poetry or as consciousness itself, and over the decades Rich would come to explore how profoundly both depended upon the situation of the body—a body among bodies—in history. The character-self in her 1993 “Introduction” can see how the…

And So “He’s already in heaven,” she said, “Sitting down to feast with Jesus.” Back then, if I had been eight or ten And she had been a peer instead Of an adult, I might have said: “You must have a hole in your head,” Meaning: you must be crazy. But I was twelve and though I thought she was insane I was too Polite and frightened to say as much. And the hole was not a metaphor But one a bullet had made that day In my brother’s head. And I Was the one who put it there. Peter was eight. I would never see Him again. No use to plea It was an accident—what does That word even mean? He was dead and I was not And she…

Self-Portrait as Mouthpiece of an Anonymous Benefactor Flocks of sparrows are waiting to be articulated. Like Bob Dylan after a concert in the middle of the night in a strange city, mount your mare of a motorcycle and ride her into the outer township, or be Emily, who broke her seclusion to walk the moonlit fields, only after midnight, as she was a jazz musician, and only with her Newfoundland, Carlo. At some point you must unpackage your pen. Your hair like an unpeopled spring-fed pond full of small leeches. Your eyes like snails on the riverbank where colonial madmen sailed. At some point be Arturo at the piano, land hard on a note like Frank and listen to its echo. Don’t think about things with any degree of largesse.…

Surface Results from ordinal logistic regression analyses indicate that African American and Latino respondents with the lightest skin are several times more likely to be seen by whites as intelligent compared with those with the darkest skin. —Lance Hannon, “White Colorism,” Social Currents, vol. 2(1), 2015 Earlier, at Cyreena’s Thanksgiving gathering, amid the city’s Black elite he’d also drawn quiet & small, had lowered his head & those inscrutable brown lagoons, which seemed to be worrying an unnamable pain. Lost, I’d say, terrified, as if forsaken in a foreign land. When I guided him into the family’s quiet den, he slowly straightened up, gawped down at me, said that he had never before been in a house like this, seen Black people like this, in a McMansion full of beige…

Would You Like Cheese with That A child with no Happy Meal whines, But I want it, to her mom who has no Chanel bag, But it’s so cute, to her husband who wants a new Jag. One long Please sung in endless rotation from a heart with a marketing hole what we fear and want pay to widen, cars to make us cool or Coke to make us kind. My son wants a bear for his bear and a phone for that bear because both phone and bear are stamped with the logo of his favorite video game. Or I’ll die, is what he says as he drops to his knees and clasps his palms in prayer as if having once given him life I have the power to…

Marvelous Sugar Baby A black woman sings azúcar! over polyrhythmic African drums on the Latino radio stations blazing from my smart phone on the above-ground subway line in Houston. La negra tiene tumbao, sings queen Celia Cruz bluntly about a señorita who doesn’t sweat the small stuff and is therefore unstoppable as she commands us all to dance to the ton-ton of a conga drum. But sugar is so soluble and precious that all it takes is a drizzle to end the night early and send the band home. You’d think stronger stuff would come from sugarcanes so hard to chop down that white men once thought only the Negros could do it. Perhaps that’s the thing about making, the strongest structure is that which is inevitably torn down, temperance…

Love Poem for the Proles My unpredictability cancels out my fidelity, which cancels out my trifling punk rock of a country heart which loves ruin more than Easter eggs and real eggs laid by real birds in real nests more than the female nakedness in the burnished black jacket trying to sell me something here on the HuffPo where I spend all day going from bad-news commotion to worse-news upshot like it’s my expertise to catalogue the twenty-first century’s decomposition as if I went to school for that and wrote a book on that when really I’m just lazy and domestic. Not yet a Granny in a rocker on a porch in West VA, but, you know, little half-pink roses on smocks and a fat philodendron in a white wire…

Villagers boxes taped up and up then tied with twine | addressed on every side | in that careful longhand taught on other continents | they looked like mail bombs | going round and round the carousel | in a regional anxiety | stinking barrel of sheep’s cheese beaded in sweat | olive oil tin wrapped in much plastic | each printed letter a rounded separate bundle | standing on its own | the sore thumbs of my parents’ immigrant luggage at the United terminal | a friend who doesn’t speak at airports | except when spoken to | word for home that could also mean journey | or neverarrived | at the baggage claim | a person waits in a t-shirt printed with English words | whose arrangement is…

AP2 Books Four-Legged Girl by Diane Seuss Graywolf Press 73 Pages, $16 paperback, 2015 “OF NEARNESS TO HER SUNDERED THINGS / THE SOUL HAS special times—,” Emily Dickinson wrote in 1862: Bright knots of Apparitions Salute us, with their wings— Among the apparitions that haunt Diane Seuss’s Four-Legged Girl, Dickinson is perhaps the progenitor ghost, present in how fully the book takes up her remark, “My Business is Circumference—,” as well as in how it embodies that other famous response, to Higginson’s proposed edits to her poems: “I thanked you for the justice—but could not drop the Bells whose jingling cooled my Tramp.” The circumference; the peripheral and rural; loss that doesn’t pretend to be redeemable: these are the subjects and weight of Seuss’s poems, which stay aloft through their…

Venus.2 each poem is a new audition for a corpse more fruit and grease for the job a treaty with arrows pointing to a clause of rust there is a conversation we reached to perform it vanished when the angel slept over even the concern of it left pilfering a theater we hold each other beasts craving our mattress and pressed flowers each audition requires lying still for the poem without breathing Venus.3 half moon parts my hair we went AWOL years ago a different interior location we listen to owl songs now another language made of many does “long villain” mean cruel for hours or tall almost got the answer in their tapering voices thin then thinner a strong odor of questions meat aisle with grotesque in a can…

The Pall of a Past World I dreamt of Ornette Coleman six months before he died. In his apartment a calendar. It said 1978. Many bad things happened in 1978 like the killings in City Hall the mayor and a supervisor both gunned down by another supervisor who didn’t like the way things were heading in 1978. Children, many of them from the city, drank the Kool-Aid laced with cyanide in Guyana in 1978, the year I celebrated my birthday at a strip club downing Seagram’s Seven-Sevens in Los Angeles with Ray and Simon. Had I known grief better and looked at it dead in the eye it would’ve been just another fly desperate between the curtains and the window’s glass. In 1978 I learned for the first time that…

Barbie Chang parks next to the soroptomist park to part her heart a hippopotamus of a heart a famous hurt fame will learn her if she lets it the women at school will school her if she lets them they write letters to only each other why bother to say hello how she fell so hard in love with the women at school but she is allergic to them achoo if they are the choo choo train she is the track necessary but unnoticed like the seventh tract home on an attractive street a streak of light missed in the sky what if Barbie Chang Skyped everyone only to discover she is the only one on the earth left the last leaf on the last tree there are hints of…

I had the good fortune to receive the following correspondence from W. S. Merwin about my essay on Galway Kinnell’s novel, Black Light. The essay was published in The American Poetry Review, January/February 2016. Writing about Galway’s undergraduate years at Princeton in the late 1940s, I had noticed the interesting constellation of poets there. William Merwin was Galway’s classmate. Two distinguished poets—the poet-critic R. P. Blackmur and the young John Berryman—were also in the Princeton community, and I had noticed that Galway had not taken classes from them. William Merwin offers this correction, which gives us a glimpse into that time: Here’s just a point I want to make, concerning Galway’s statement that he didn’t take classes with Blackmur or Berryman because he didn’t believe in teaching writing. Galway and…

The Watch I threw a watch into Lake Michigan In honor of eternity I’d do anything To make her laugh on the jagged rocks It started to rain at Evanston Beach Her sadness was like a great cloud In a suburb north of the city We used to neck in her parents’ kitchen I remember the heat of our bodies Against the refrigerator One Sunday morning I went to church with her family And stood up when everyone else knelt down She believed the voice of the Lord God walked In the garden in the cool of the day But I heard thunderstorms I recall the lightning between us The night we broke up in a small red car In a parking lot near the beach We sobbed for hours…

The Collection of the Canter Three days a week, into that stable of pre-adolescence I strode, where the smell of Absorbine and hoof dressing rose astringent from the cross ties, where a girl in muddy boots circled a curry comb, where the language of bridles and bits rolled in my mouth as I said d-ring snaffle and rubber pelham, Kimberwicke and hackamore. And I learned a horse must come to the bit, you cannot force him to collect himself, you must ask him with your weight and legs and hands. The girl walked her horse into his stall, unbuckled the halter, and hugged the V where the breastplate left a sweaty place she scrubbed away. We grazed them on braided nylon ropes or leather lead shanks. Tornado, the open jumper,…

The Cows Now that I have read this story about the cows I think of them at night when I cannot sleep, how they are so still in their grassy field, seemingly suspended like animations of themselves. Even though there are only 3 of them, I count them over and over, envision them as if I were floating above their pasture, observe the different stances they choose: the 3 of them standing bottom to bottom, or head to head, sometimes in a row, one behind the other sometimes side by side. They stand where they want and nurse their calves. They lie down in their field when they feel like it. If the farmer wants to kill one, and it won’t get in the truck he gives up and lets…

ATALL PAINTING OF A CLUT TERED ARTIST’S STUDIO HUNG on the main wall of Jane Cooper’s tidy living room. The painting depicted a room filled with canvases and objects and a rug spread out over the floor, a large shadowed crease folded at the rug’s center. During a visit, we discussed the painting, and Jane smiled and said, “Adrienne Rich has astutely observed that the crease is the only wrinkle in my home.” That wrinkle in Jane Cooper’s neat home represents how she entered a poem. Her characteristic orderliness allowed her, paradoxically, to notice sweet disorder, to pay attention to chaos amidst the fearful symmetry; this noticing led to poems of wild civility. Cooper was interested in observation, in seeing the real—in all of its mess, simplicity, and splendor—in embracing,…

AP2 A Column “The Eagle’s Mile” The long title poem in James Dickey’s last collection, The Eagle’s Mile, recounts the afterlife journey of a man’s soul with undoubted credibility. The protagonist was an actual distinguished U.S. Supreme Court Justice, who died one year before the poem’s incantations summoning the return—or rebirth—of his soul transpire. Various salient facts of the Judge’s life are woven, piecemeal, into the narrative. He was blind in one eye and wore a patch, giving him tunnel vision of a kind that the speaker suggests was an asset to him when he followed a difficult hiker’s trail in Appalachia. Clearly, he was a man who loved to take long hikes, and he’d lost his eye while travelling down a river in England many years before his death. Unwarned,…

Since it’s true that, in hard stone, one will at times make the image of someone else look like himself, I often make her dreary and ashen, just as I am made by this woman. THUS BEGINS A MADRIGAL BY MICHElangelo, 1 who in another poem addresses how painting similarly betrays its creator’s state of mind. Poets have throughout chronicled western literature evoked and responded to visual art. Homer’s description in the Iliad of Achilles’s shield, a magnificent, custom-made implement replete with depictions of scenes both bucolic and urban, of situations of both conflict and peace, is generally identified as the earliest example of ekphrastic2 poetry, or poetry that considers visual art. About a millennium after Homer, Horace began his Ars Poetica epistle by conjuring a painting in which “some…

The mountain was high enough to see from the middle of our street on a very clear day. Miles away! The natural world! Invisible trees made a thumby blanket and I am up too late. The moon fell into the alley; it’s crying like a baby, going red in the face. Call back the St. Helena Olive, will you? Cell phone? Beeper? Alphabet made of smoke? Memo to all evergreens: Hail to the poplar! Mighty black oak! American chestnut! Toppling! Just kidding. When I say natural I mean anything outside the home. Pine boughs stuck out from the trunk like arms on a toddler who wants to be picked up but really doesn’t. Put me down. Pine needles tear at your hair to see what you do. How you tick.…