Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2019 i The American Poetry Review

A big literary conference is probably not the best place for a poet dealing with a mental breakdown. But there I was at AWP, skittishly perusing tables at the book fair, under the garish lights of the Minneapolis Convention Center. For two years, paralyzed by depression and anxiety, I was barely able to leave my apartment. Staying inside was also a problem because the TV, phone and microwave seemed to be emitting high-pitched whines. I’d contemplated suicide. But with the help of my husband, a good shrink and poetry, I was slowly recovering. I still wasn’t 100% myself, but just being in that crowd felt like a great victory. At the Tavern Books table, I picked up a poetry collection with a striking title: The Fire’s Journey. As I paged…

Just this morning I opened you upTo learn the difference betweenTheology and theosophy. You let me interruptMy reading and now I don’t know what either means.Instead I know using my thumbI can press your button and thenOn your screen watch you becomeThe mistress of fact, like the time whenThis afternoon I learned that all too soonYou’ll come with software that’ll unlock your denseand dark-faced tombBy IDing 88 spots on my countenance.OK fine—of course I know one means the study of beliefWhile the other confirms god will bring no relief Daniel Torday is the author of the novel The Last Flight of Poxl West, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and an International Dublin Literary Award nominee. A twotime National Jewish Book Awardee and winner of the 2017 Sami…

Diorama (woman wearing mink and smudges) It’s my jobto wear a fur stole and appear impatient. Also my job:drive up and open the carriage door for the irritated old lady. Of course, it’s not really a carriage.Each object is a story written in a script so small it appears to form a solid.Of course, it’s not really a job.Becoming only takes a second,as most living things know. The changes in weight and bone structuretake conviction. If need be,if you can’t use your hands like a netto contain them, you can curl upin the sawdust while your cavities firm and cool. No matter what seam is open, though,we have to be ready.If we hear movement at night, we have to untwist and step off the porch unfinished.Shoot into the air. Give…

—Cloud cold sky. He was speaking of Turner,though we had just turned the corner on Well Walkand down the last cobbles to the Keats house,its gray-white stone walls gathered like ground fog.He had talked all day—painting to painting—through one long room in London’s National.He bit into his beard to quiet now.Tight grass. Cankered catalpa in half-leaf. In books he calls the paintings landscapes ofwater, wild beyond human artifice.They are what our feelings are without us.They are, beyond us, peaceable masters—in poem after poem on Keats, clouds,then the talking essays, the cataloguingstudent in him calling forth poetryeven in the later prose. Of The Sun of Venice Going to Sea—dark oil. Itis only a fishing boat, yet it caststhe larger spell of a vessel movingin the direction of a destiny…—We’d crossed the…

October 2, 2016 I had never atoned for anything before these Days of Awe.When the dog brought the dead bird to the door, I buried it without examination.I offered it no kaddish.I wiped the blood from the dog’s nose and washed my white hands whiter.In the mirror, my black hair hid my eyes from my eyes.Naomi, this year my petition will require the attention of a thousand gods.This year I must add I tried to die to the list and listen as the one god writes it down.(How must I look to him, as each confession opens its wings to life under the soil.)The frost gathers on the ground at dusk now, hardening the earth.Yamim Nora’im falls late this year.If our god brings me a new body, I must tend…

Small Hearts of Animals for Rouge they do not knowthe joy they walk with their footprints a lessonof faith O faithful companion of lonelinessthe name we gave you was not a name but a cryand you stayedand now they come to hunt in the wildnot for meat not with the ritual for killing this blood I return to the groundis my blood this animal trapped and waiting for the knife is my bodyhere we take only the things we need here we bury the animal deadfrom old age they do not know the name we have for hunting is mercytheir rifles are powerful enough to stop a heart in secondsO lord they pose with the dead they smile into their camerathey stand and say look what my hands have rendered…

The Simple Mechanics of the Evening Because this winter riveris an envelopefolding self into self and the new shapeis whatever ideaI attach myself to because everything weightedis allotted rankin the order of the evening because brown and blown outthe river carries its snags and new mud islands appearlike insurgent political parties grass-anchoreddefiantthen gone because a thingan ideaand because a thing again is a manwatching the image of a treemove across the river because today a border was movedso a shadow could take power because the shadowin its military creasestrode across a stage as wideat leastas this river because today over thereis nine hoursahead of todayover here because we livein a verb tensethat followsall the gearsin all the clocksthrough every evening because in wintersome dogsare never metaphors but they cross uswith…

Don’t say that you love me!Just tell me that you want me!Tusk! Tusk! Tusk! Tusk!—Fleetwood Mac, “Tusk” THE ANIMAL This lecture⋆ is called “The Beast: How Poetry Makes Us Human,” but it used to be called simply “The Animal.” When I called it “The Animal,” I was using the word animal l for a few reasons. The first is because for a long time I have been interested in the idea of the Wild in poetry, and the idea that poetry is an animal somehow through its wild use of language. I’ve been invested in the notion of a poem being feral (as Lucie Brock-Broido described this term to her students) and how this ferality could make a being partly not part of itself and partly wholly of the self…

Vectors 5.2: PG-50 It’s soothing when the newly dead are way older than I am. This guy was 95. His picture—middle-aged, archaic glasses—freezes him somewhere around 1970. But even when they are my age and live in my town and share so many of my habits and interests that it’s upsetting, I keep on. Since never in recorded history has anyone died while reading the obituaries. When we’re talking happily, life is enough. It’s when I’m sitting around restless and bored with it that I worry about how little is left. The years get shorter but the hours are just as long It’s not so much that I’m hard of hearing, it’s just that it takes me longer to get back from wherever I go in my head these days.…

Animals I think I could turn and live with animals—Whitman O Walt you were wrong, they aren’t placid or self-containedI just watched a spoonbill make carpaccio out of a frog& crocodiles dining on wildebeests trying to cross the Maro River It’s wrong to say O in poetry these dayswhich makes me want to have a loud orgasm right herein an unashamed animal way You must have been looking at some cows on a farm but who wants to livelike thatstanding around in a shed with sore tits, shitting claustrophobicallyor standing around shitting & being tortured by flies & eating grass I know you like grass but it’s no fun to be a pricey pre-hamburgerruminating with no TVIf you’d had a cable subscription maybe you would have felt differentlywatching NatGeo Wild…

Out of Business I’d been there before, to that strip of shoeshine parlors,hole-in-the-wall clothiers, the sprawling hardware store,the Sphinx movie theatre whose marqueeadvertised some Bette Davis or Jimmy Stewart smash playing since 1944. Some were boarded upor plastered with Going Out of Business signs.Behind the counter, clerks busied themselveswith files of delinquent accounts. The office had last been refurbished in Coolidge’s day,with a varnished rolltop and torn palimpsestsof wallpaper. A short man embraced me—my father’sfather, I knew that instant, the butt of drunken glory, jobs lost after bourbon lunches, mortgages and wivesabandoned, the career promised at Carnegie Techreduced to upper rooms in a funeral home,a new wife we’d never met, nothing to show. I looked down on the old man’s thinning hairwith something like fondness. Yet that ghostcould not have…

“Poetry is a waste of time,” my roommate asserted, settling himself at the kitchen table; “it doesn’t do anything.” This sentiment, hailing from a political activist, wasn’t too surprising, but it was oddly reminiscent of a remark made earlier by my brother, a moderately liberal civil engineer. “I don’t know if I’ll ever respect what you do,” he had said unapologetically. No, he said, he had not read my new book of poems, nor did he intend to. “I wrote a book on traffic safety for work—would you like to read that?” Like most American poets and artists, my life is full of people who believe that art and poetry—two practices I love—are utterly valueless. As artists, we are repeatedly told that our work is best relegated to periods of…

Knucklebones Like Frida, who had a bellyful of NihilistsI had a bellyful too,only it was hellfire ecstaticsriding, as they did, on white horseswith swords sticking out of their mouths. I lived in Alabama P.A.I loved the cheap real estatebut I hated that they drank white vinegarand ate supper at five o’clockand what their tattoos were and where they put themso I gave up talkingand spent the afternoon in the low mountainsand drove up and down the steep roadsstudying the cows. Frida, full of charm and cunning,asked Henry Ford if he were a Jew.He loved to dance with hernor did Rivera shoot him with the .38he carried in his hip pocketfor he was driving the new roadster Ford gave him. So here’s to Miniver Cheevy and here’s to Shelleyand here’s to…

After every party at my house, every dinner with relatives, after each meeting, or a lesson I’m not sure how to teach, I announce to no one, Well, no one died. In this case I’m not sure what joke to make, everything good so legislated to be crushed. Am not interested in trying the seafood. Early on, had never considered a political party or marriage. Had not considered until now the birds panting to death in the heat. Did what any part-Mongolian person would do and went northward in summer to Iceland: green, white, and black. Tourists laugh all down the highway at the landscape so operatic it hurts. The lake illuminated by low sun at eleven p.m. Tourists die there, not reading the signs, or we fall from cliffs…

Love Be a Slow-Moving Storm Love, come cast your body across the city, burgeoning like an odalisque—your gaze trained to the west from whence you came, where you gathered. Bared flesh in churn, Love, give not a damn for our commutes. Love, make from seconds sloshing cubic feet, transform intersections into stalling pits. Conjure rivers from roads. None die from drowning. We are bred and born submerged. We stumble away from our mothers forgetting how to aspirate any substance but air. Love, fill the lungs underneath the city. Flush our toxins into the bay. Then beckon back the bay, Love, to take our sidewalks in a surge. Bathe we in we. You know I am in no rush to be anything but this breathing conundrum—an inorganic anomaly known as personhood.…

The women of the water people give barley bread to the horsegrains of bird food to the man who opened the cagethen bury him at the foot of the yew treelet him die if that’s the wish of the bird who flew off unreflectingthe widow knows how to make him more supple to slip him into the earthwithout breaking his bones the water people bury their dead behind the waterfalltheir voices are carried by the noisy waterthey owe nothing to anyone only the water that strides along knows how to wash away suffering, they say Asking advice of the empathy tree is only good for the dead, they say up therevultures’ flight read backwards announces consolation and prosperitythe man whose wealth is seven spades will bury his old horse and…

Mélange The village’s sausage specialtywas pork and chicken groundas fine as a mist—or sometimeschicken and mollusc,maybe beef and shad, or—they could sometimes find a talonor a beak in the mix,like punctuation. And sothese were something like mythological creatures,a griffin, a centaur:more than one,in one.It reminds me of what I’ve readabout the shoddier mummificationsin ancient Egypt: occasional bonesof birds, of sows, of feral catswere added in, to help out, clumsily, whena human part went missing: presumablysometimes someone woke upin the Fields of Everlasting with an armand, on her other side, in an uneasy balance,a wing. She might consider herselfa slightly third-rate versionof the gods—those lovely human bodies,male and female both, but with the headsof hawks or ibises or lions, with the aspectof the ape, the hippopotamus, the scorpion.And when I think,…

Praise these your fingers their tiny bones each onea tooth a needle a loosening and reachnamed for how far they grow away from youfor their distance from your other bones fromyour body or mine the one closestto your palm proximal phalanxa surrender a shield the subsequenta phalange something I can’t understandlike your pinky toe too smallto lodge inside my heart but there it isthe smallest part of you forever therekeeping time and beating you laugh and pushyour whole foot in my mouth how funnythat it fits there so completely that you loveknowing it has a home inside thenthe middle bone and distal one togetherthey are everything your hands can holdand everything your feet may tread ontogether they are everything I’m made ofbone of my bone blood of mine and not…