Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2016 i The American Poetry Review

six poems Something You Should Know is that as a kid, I once worked at a pet store. I cleaned the cages of small animals like turtles, hamsters, rabbits, and hermit crabs. I watched the hermit crab continue to grow, molt, shed its skin and scurry across the bottom of the aquarium to find a new shell. Which left me afraid for the small creature, to run around all exposed that way, to have to live its entire life requiring something else to feel safe. Perhaps that is when I became afraid of needing anything beyond myself. Perhaps that is why, even now, I can want so desperately to show you all of my skin, but am more afraid of meeting you, exposed, in open water. The Boy and His…

Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 17–18, 2015 david roderick Let’s start by talking about the title poem in Standoff, mostly because the way it opens (“I like reality. I like Rome / especially, its diesel fuel / and roasted coffee beans / intact & on the feast day / of San Lorenzo di Perugia . . .”) sounds like vintage Rivard to me. And yet, when you’ve spoken of the poem, you sound wary or uncertain, as if it developed in an unusual way. david rivard The original draft of the poem was about twenty pages long, and I wrote all of it at Civitella Ranieri, the arts foundation in Umbria where I had a residency in 2012. I had never been to an arts colony. Anywhere. When I told Charlie Simic…

I. Why do we read literature? I’d spent so much of my life reading, and suddenly I couldn’t answer that question. I stopped reading—or, rather, I read in a completely different way—I read about things. I read to learn, worried that literature simply repeated the traumas, violence, and amnesia of our culture’s history. I read history and I read spiritual texts in an attempt to come to a clear space, to stand in the present moment fully, with clear eyes, as if in understanding I could free myself from the entanglements of the past. I was thirty-six. I was married, had two healthy children, and was working as a writer and teacher. But I felt haunted. In the past years, I had been absorbed in an intense process of self-discovery,…

Allay I was railing against. Parallel to a physical pain, an how-could-this-have-happened pain, it shouted from its eyes, its wooden floors and ceilings. Then I was railing against the against. The mass of curtains against the windows failed to block out the light, which insisted. The curtains were against me and I was protesting, wanting to seal and bar. The curtains were failing. Then a man had a dream. In the dream his grandfather, Jonah, spoke to him from the withheld. Told him to learn from the Talmud a certain tractate. The grandfather had been a man who had never opened the Talmud. The dreaming man read the tractate the next day, leaning over the book, with his learning partner, the Aramaic pressing against the Aramaic beneath the page, thousands…

Lineage someone mentions ‘tenderest’ you want to believe superlatives mean nothing to you if your wife werent always saying ‘always’ and your doctor werent likewise always saying ‘never’ the daisy on the other hand is charmingly indeterminate part weed part aster if only you might enjoy the subtleties instead of forcing language to its knees or better yet walking it to a cliff as though you were merely being solicitous Good Mother Tongue Good Father Death cant you see language is trembling cant you see it just wants down Benjamin Landry is the author of Burn Lyrics, Particle and Wave and An Ocean Away. He has taught at the University of Michigan and Oberlin College, and his poetry and reviews have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica, The New Yorker, Poetry…

“Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions,” James Joyce wrote in Ulysses in 1922, no doubt hoping his own work would one day occupy one of those mansions. For Joyce the passage of time represented the elastic nature of eternality; the longer a thing is read and studied the more alive it grows. James Joyce is long dead; Ulysses yet lives. It further goes without saying that scores of writers, 20th century and otherwise, agreed and agree with Joyce vis-a-vis the eternality of well-crafted literature. What made a book come to life during its creation will hopefully retain that vivacity after its author has passed on. In his 1991 novel Immortality Milan Kundera has the (immortally?) deceased authors Ernest Hemingway and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe debate what the term the book takes…

Litany (Flying) Because of the clear slender tube of her hearing aid curled into the secret of the little girl’s ear. Of the turquoise pill I swallow, unfurling its bright work. Of the torn corner of the envelope, burrowed at the bottom of the bag. Because of what burrows, what begins. Because the gridded lines of city scumbled now under cloud. Because of the long wait before, and how full it was of wanting. Then the word something nested near always, and the briefer words between made of twigs woven to keep the others safe. Through scratched glass, the blinding rush of sun. The small girl’s fox-bright eyes. And daffodils on the dresser back home, because all of them must be open now. Kasey Jueds is the author of Keeper…

two poems I’ve been here an hour and haven’t seen his pitch work. “Donate for Street Pulse?” in an upward arpeggio and then “have a nice day” back down on the black keys. It reminds me of Woody Guthrie, my friend’s friend’s dead uncle, who must be patron saint of a scene like this where on the capitol lawn, another man barks loudly into the rotunda, though I think he just wants to hear the sound, not advocate for any cause. Some protest about the new oil lines. Some protest about the learnin’. At the next table, three engineering students diagram a new holographic projector one might run from one’s glasses to show bit-drops from famous movies in the air around your head. You’d buy them like ringtones and illuminate…

two poems Pastoral: Divining Rod It’s the balsamic moon, mid-April, the near-dark phase between Seed and Hare, insemination season, and the thirteen women are meeting again in the house perched in the still-bare trees by the salt marsh. How do I say to these kind, careful, hurting women that what I want is horsepower, which here in the country often refers to a small farm where actual horses drag actual logs in from the woodlot, but what I mean is your horsepower, you hung like a horse and engaged in the biology of your power? How to say that when you say I want to fuck you till you see stars and then keep pounding I am engaged in the biology of my power, and am taking it as the…

two poems The Bubbling Pool in Jost Van Dyke We bathe in streetlights with our legs sunken knee deep in water like black treacle. From the dock through palm trees and sea grapes, we navigate on this island of low-country folklore. The sky like a rum aged in oak casks becomes dark in color. The hiking trails made by grizzly, taper tailed mongoose, lead us to the bubbly pool. At first blush, the lagoon is frothing and lukewarm. The distant yet strong scent of blackened flying fish subdues the ever lingering smell of foretime. We tell the youngest of the group, “watch out for sea urchins.” He has yet to know of the venom within their thick spines that stick out like the buds of a flowering plant. He can…

two poems To Charlie, on His Poetry For C. K. Williams Confession implies shame you had none of that you did those c-scans of your own mind shamelessly, following every fold, penetrating every layer: the mind looking at itself, the mind examining itself—Guilt yes, anger yes, lust yes, like a carnival ride, the lacquered car careening all over the area, zipping, bumping, to a viewer it might seem out of control but no, it was only passionately honest. The zoom of your poem would often pull far out from the scene you were capturing, then you would nail it, down to the last pixel of the truth. The truth was not inscrutable but it resisted, it wanted to wrestle. Fear yes, doubt absolutely, and don’t forget sweet love, breaching like…

Faces of Coherency The thumbnail history of poetry is often phrased as follows: An aesthetics of coherency gets replaced by an aesthetics of disruption. Then, vice versa. If you grew up in the orderly sheen of the formal suburbs, well . . . no thanks. Give me the turbulence of an Imagist’s city. If you grew up in the city, then . . . farewell. Show me that shadow consciousness on the prairie’s horizon. The woes for one are the joys for another. It’s a phenomenon that persists: Transcendentalism gets overtaken by Victorianism, Victorianism by Modernism, Modernism by Confessionalism, Confessionalism by Conceptualism, Conceptualism by Identity-ism. Of course, poet by poet, book by book, poem by poem, it’s never so simplistic as all that. Most poets work in the margins of…

Thinking About Basho That laundry won’t Fold itself I think and I watch the moon, Treading softly In the dim corona Of lamplight Swathing the room. But what about Basho, and, In a way It was fun Not to see Mount Fuji In foggy rain, And also, Not knowing The name of the tree, I stood in the flood Of its sweet smell . . . I listen to the echoes of Haikus in my head, And cannot bring myself To flee the moon’s stare, Or wander away from Basho’s Pathways— So I read Haikus, And listen to music, (Basho singing) And the laundry is forgotten, And the moon. But not Basho, As I say, To talk casually About an iris flower Is one of the pleasures Of the wandering…

two poems Song what makes me lonely is the little voice inside my head telling me I am lonely in just those words I am lonely I know I am a voice inside me tells me I am lonely and won’t leave me alone The Messenger’s Name beautiful when Iris not knowing her name fills her plastic blue watering can water from the bright green hose and waters the flower dying in the big blue bowl & later when at the pool in all the heat reading beneath the blue umbrella Iris walks across the concrete walks backward to see her feet leave her wet prints prints her hands on the white ground and says to me Does it scare your brain? Does it scare your brain? Dan Beachy-Quick’s most…

Dream In the closed wall of dull-on night, in close quarters to being basted, all sound’s lost, all ancients lost, all bright and glamming loss on the floor where with all dirty clothes piles dreaming goes faster to gone. I close the door, close out the throng. New year: I’ve lost the tune or drifted it, dreamt light in loss down into it. What’s nearer than night’s close to bone is the long unslept-on line that, cheer girl, I’ve long known. There are songs where this looks beautiful, each note lines the floor darker to true. I wrote a song where I almost liked it, those blues, a song to lose hours in, to cut even bad lines. Anne Marie Rooney is the author of Spitshine (Carnegie Mellon University Press,…

two poems Standoff I like reality. I like Rome especially, its diesel fuel and roasted coffee beans intact & on the feast day of San Lorenzo di Perugia or thereabouts a plate of spinach & sliced sausage to eat (the whole concoction dished up on torta al testo, a sort of primeval bread); I like to see a manhole struck by a snowplow too— maybe because it’s an accident, and some of what happens by accident occasionally (or more than occasionally) ought to be thought a gift?—the sparks kicked out by the plow blade blowing like thin solar flares across a dark, snowy street; and the princessas—it’s good to have them singing on the radio while I drive across town—all of those merrymaking, anorectic young women close at hand then,…

First Elegy The night my grief passed through me most completely, I was making dinner. I had lit the grill and reached as ever to give a quick metallic scrub and then I realized you were ash. It was the day however many days after your death they’d said cremation would take place, which hadn’t struck me until the puff of these ashes in their shining chamber flung at me the knowledge of your body gone, incinerated, no mistake, no hope— me a zero stuffed with breath. A swarm of tears, and cries like none that I had ever made hauled through me, hauled my ‘soul’ my presence of mind my poise my being-anyone-at-all into a place of menace, the place where losing you meant losing everything about the way…

five poems M__TM___RE (90) No. 27, rue de and an adjoining an enormous a a fireplace, a massive walls without an inch covered with the works Picasso, and others. It wasn’t a weren’t worth much a single key: a flat American- pocket, a far cry clanked about answer the ‘Who sent you?’ name of an artist —painters, writers, poets— could eat and drink was art, The into the pockets to converse to everything, herself, M__TM___RE (97) noticed from the Ivory Coast hung the mask over . This is born. and African pieces that his work Picasso and from another time, a challenge to a degree art into their making duel between carried out with canvases, in great masterpieces. Matisse in 1906, legend: Le Bonheur de vivre. a mixture of primitivism…

two poems Kairos Where an edge should order, all is smear, blush: same cordgrass, same song; flash of wing, longing ~~ Why are we said to fall in love, and not to be cast? The world is without waiver; there is nowhere else to go ~~ cast (v.): to throw something onto the seashore to make something (light or shadow) appear in a place to generate a sense of uncertainty to remove or banish something from your mind decisively, and often with difficulty to throw somebody or something somewhere, especially in a brutal way to select the players to mold to drop or lose something to add or calculate something to shed or leave something, for example, a skin ~~ Here is another translation: We sit watching fires the dusk…

The Two Say iron is sweet, tree is square Say the door is glued together I can’t agree with you more or less Say water descends from heaven, air runs below Say this is a game of in-betweens I can’t agree with you more or less The lesser me can’t agree with you Who says what doesn’t appear has been thwarted To make room for what should appear The more of me is agreed by the lesser of you Who says what is lost will be regained and to have sooner Is to have later what can’t be taken away That is to say the glued door can be opened And iron has the taste and shape of a tree That is to say water and air are not separate…

I. Recently, I visited the Museum of Death, in Holly- wood, to see the preserved head of “The Bluebeard of Paris”: the French serial killer Henri Désiré Landru, who was guillotined in 1922 for murder- ing ten of his fiancées. Beneath the glass display dome, Landru’s mummified face resembled the matte texture of charcoal and his frayed lips re- called the fibrous edges of a dried mango slice. I lingered over the museum’s other collections: logo-engraved pocket knives from 1970s funeral homes; prison shivs from Alabama; Victorian mourning lockets stuffed with human hair. Since my childhood, I’ve been drawn to imagery of ghostly or macabre sort, fascinated by the strange stories behind the objects. And long before I knew the term “Southern Gothic,” I appreciated haunting quality that characterized many…