Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2020 i The American Poetry Review

The Voice Outside Dublin, Texas the radio stationsdisappear and I’m left alone with the faintvoice of a call-in psychologist talkingto a man in Cleveland about the voiceof the self, the narratives that voicetells, how they can be sharp and wrongand cut to the bone—whose bone? I don’tknow. It’s hard for me to imagine beinghuman, even at this late a date, and it’simpossible to know with certainty thatwithin my own chest there pumps a heartthe size of my fist. The narrative of the manon the radio is foreign to me—he lost moneygoing into business with a friend and is angryand vengeful and resistant to the adviceof the nice psychologist. And yet hisvoice—the voice he speaks with—is sotender, so familiar. We’re here so briefly,the voice under his words says, and we seeso…

Death Fugue: Violin Then I heard a violinand it didn’t matter that I was a Jew,they are painting swastikas on campus walls.What happens when they paint them on my doorfor my kids to see?I will sic the cat after them.I will sic the violin after them.What can a violin doto a man who paints a swastika on your window,––who etches one into the lid of your piano?I’ll tell you what it can do.It can fuck you up.It matters that I am a Jew.That’s what I said to the cat.Then I imagined being dead on the attic floor.The cat would eat my eyeballs out.He don’t care that I come from Poland, Russia, Transylvania beforethe pogrom.That’s what cats do—suck out your dead eyes.Violins don’t do that.When I heard it, it mattered that…

Sometime in 1985, I sit at a table in a college library among tall metal shelves, gray or green, that squeak if you lean against them or slide a heavy book across the horizontal rims, a rinse of dust always in the air. I’ve pulled out a large art book, its pages spread before me. To my left, plate-glass windows open on swathes of green, trees, granite buildings. I’m intrigued by Camille Pissarro’s paintings, his pointillism and the indeterminacy that technique creates. Shapes shift and merge as I bring my face closer, then further back from the glossy plate glued to a heavy paper page. The plate depicts a sunny field through which a path is trod into a wooded area in the background. Where the path bends are two…

Let’s say I am significant & this,how this leads to all possibilitiesinside & outside the skull—this too,a form of logic & factof imagination, as imagining itself intofact—we imagineourselves every moment; Icreate I; how we find ourselvesin space of each other; howa page waitson tiptoes, on edges forour participation. Do you feelattention in these inadequatestrokes of language? Foundationsmatter. A lack defines onlyrelative to something other; I amsomething other & I love youregardless of the withoutsyou labeled me, regardless ofyour knuckles at my lips &how I’ve come to knowthe taste of iron in my blood& I want to believe that makesme strong. Who gets to decidewhat without looks like? I askbut you know that I know;I know I know—how I findcomfort in questionsyou do not wish me to askabout my body, my…

I am not aloneat this jeweled templeby the sea where a blind man sells lottery tickets.His vision foretells wealth—numbers and stars and a floating future bright like the riseof the sun. His clothes:more dirt than fabric, his shoes the hardened solesof his feet. Today, he says,waves whisper secrets only he can hear. I am a visitorin this harsh land of light,in this wind cruel to skin. My pockets are full of coinswith the faces of foreignkings that clink when I walk with ghosts. To walk is power,to walk away privilege.The world is cruel and heavy and forsakes.Monks pray like beesin a hollow cave that no one hears. Lord Buddha,I ask for a kind light.I’ll stop now. The beggars here are tearless.The ones I’ve shed filla forgotten well. My sorrows are…

I remembered the sedimentologist Karen Kleinspehn saying to me in these same mountains, “You can’t cope with this in an organized way, because the rocks aren’t organized.”—John McPhee, Assembling California 1. There’s a term that’s been circulating in the spheres of poetry I like: geopoetics. I’ve heard it for several years, and have always loved it, despite never fully grasping its meaning. I figure it has to mean something beyond simply “poems about rocks,” but if that’s all it means, well, then I like it even more. Right now I won’t attempt to track down a geopoetic manifesto to clarify the matter, because I’m at a cabin pleasantly removed from the grid, and I don’t have an internet connection, and anyway it seems like geopoetics and the internet shouldn’t have…

[WAR PAINT] They used to grind flower and seed,charcoal, ochre, gypsum, clay, creeper, dry buffalo lard and gut, chokeberry,pestle shell and lapis, hibiscus, excrement, then bind pigment with spit or piss,yolk or blood—You got yours at Walmart, America’s like that, and paint your sonstanding at ease, sort of, backpack, superhero lunch box. One white thumbat a time, sand you can’t get out of your head, as if donning for combat, nota second grade play cobbled from the state- mandated curriculum. You do not sayyou are thinking of brothers who follow each other, paroled, pill after pill,like kids filing onto a bus soon gone into the leaded hills and rivers of Idaho.You kiss him square on his forehead and turn back, no trace, no ounce,to ward off rage, a boredom more…

Like everything delicious, I was warned against it.Those mornings, I’d slowly descend the stairsin my plaid Catholic school uniform skirt, find my parentseating behind newspapers, coned in separate silences.The only music was the throat-clearing rasp of toastbeing scraped with too-little butter, three passesof the blade, kkrrrrr, kkrrrr, kkrrr, battle hymn of the eighties.When I pulled the butter close, my mother’s eyeswould twitch to my knife, measuring my measuring—the goal, she’d shared from Weight Watchers,a pat so thin the light shines through. If I disobeyed,indulged, slathered my toast to glistening lace,I’d earn her favorite admonition, predictable as Sunday’sdry communion wafer: “A moment on the lips…”I couldn’t stop my head from chiming, forever on the hips. Hips? They were my other dangerous excess.I was growing them in secret beneath my skirt,and when…

Kaveh Akbar and Jane Hirshfield have been in a running e-mail conversation since January 2016, when Akbar first contacted Hirshfield about doing an interview in his Divedapper series, before his first, widely acclaimed book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017), swept him into the constellation of contemporary poets. This excerpt from that ongoing, now years-long dialogue was created for American Poetry Review in conjunction with the publication of Hirshfield’s ninth book of poetry, Ledger, published by Knopf in March 2020. KAVEH AKBAR So much of your new book, Ledger, and your work at large, seems to be orbiting a nucleus of bewilderment—bewilderment at trees, falcons, history, language, yes, but also bewilderment at our “little souls,” bewilderment at humanity’s capacity for cruelty to each other despite our overwhelming…

No one tells me how to name it, I name itanimal. I tell it never come. I watch itstrengthen on the fever farm, take tendon after tendon, lift its own spoonat the family table, taste. I watch it grow tallwith the family’s starch and salt, the sweat and the family’s wide-awakeeyes staring like light beamsat the all-night ceiling, fear fuel. No one tells me how to name it,I name it animal. I name it clean-crushedbeer can, cop-outfit calling, binge dawn. I tell it come here, come willing to dance, say:take me by the eyes and explainyourself and your blood time with this blood life—this river family,that valley farm. I say What took us downthat day, river-worn, wordless? What takes us down, animal? Explain you. Brynn Saito is the author of…

Kids already asleep, the grownups sit out on the deck,a few empty cans, an open bottle of wine on the table, I’m sure, and stacked paper plates with half-eaten buns and dirty napkins.From my backyard next door, I can hear them, the living, chatting. I can’t make out many words, mostly the rhythm, and laughing.Death is not what they’re discussing. “Goodnight,” a woman says. “Goodnight,” a few of them answer. A carwakes, and then its growl fades into the distance. Wind rises and falls, tellingthe trees to tell one another.Air conditioners hum forever. Clocks ticking. Grains of sand falling.What else is there to think about? But what is the thought? Some small animalcrunching around in the ivy. A plane arching across or falling from the sky.Endless seas reaching toward the…

In his seminal essay on virtue, Emmanuel Levinas observes, “Humility is not to be confused with an equivocal negation of one’s Self, already proud of its virtue, which in reflection, it immediately recognizes in itself.” Here Levinas rightly calls our attention to the self-congratulatory mindset that abounds among the liberally inclined, challenging us to strive for a relationship to virtue that is more just and more true. By gesturing toward a definition of humility that lacks self-consciousness, Levinas calls for a kind of selflessness that offers no immediate reward in and of itself. Two recent collections of poetry interrogate the startling self-consciousness that has come to be associated with virtuous behavior, asking whether this kind of introspection can instead serve the other. Paige Lewis’s Space Struck and Maya C. Popa’s…

The Quality of Nothing (After This Nothing Happened) “Why is there something rather than nothing?” feels disingenuous, on an ontological level, because we think of even nothing as something. I think of nothing as empty space in all directions. But emptiness, darkness, is something. It feels like we’d need some light to see the darkness; we’d need some time to see the space. (Nothing happened before this, because no thing happens in no time.) It feels like, if space were transparent, we’d have to see something through it on the other side. But nothing has no sides. The question is, why is there something or nothing? Why that nothing, instead of some other, under-nothing? Which is more frightening, nothing or empty space? What’s the difference between scared and afraid? Is…

Eating a Dollar Slice in the Rain for Carlie All the money I’ve spenton cheap umbrellas,I could have bought the greatestumbrella in the worldor an umbrella made of gold,something that doesn’t cowerin even the slightest wind.But poverty forces shortsightedness,short breaths to keep moving,small portions. The sign saysPizza Slice $1, Pizza Slice With Any Toppings $2.Toppings are a luxury. If I hadthree dollars for another shit umbrellaI’d still choose the pizza. If I hadtwo dollars I’d get two slices. For My Uncle Lulu, Who Was Deported for Jumping a Subway Turnstile in 2003 Two dollars he didn’t haveor didn’t want to spend.That’s all it took. No passfor a misdemeanor. Maybehe wanted to save that moneyfor beer, always drinking.The bright side: the two dollarssaved will go a lot fartherin Santo Domingo thanthey…

After Alejandro Jodorowsky I watch blood leave my body & travel into a machinethat separates the plasma from the red cells by spinning at high speeds. The plasma is yellow and fatty. Theytell me that I am doing good & that I am a good person. My red cells are mixed with a saline solution & pumpedback into my other arm. I taste it on my tongue. The nurse asks if I am okay, & I tell her that I am in another reality.My vision blurs into a box. I see the dying elephant, its trunk bleeding into the cobbled street. She is there watching. She knowswhat blood means, she has bathed in its thickness, tasted its metal. I come to on the floor, bathroom lights buzzing. I’m cold &…

1. Shortly before I died,Or possibly after,I moved to a small village by the sea. You’ll recognize it, as did I, because I’ve writtenAbout this village before.The rocky sliver of land, the little houses where the fishermen once lived— We had everything we needed: a couple of roomsOverlooking the harbor,A small collection of books,Paperbacks, the pagesBrittle with age. How, if I’d never seenThe village, had I pictured it so accurately?How did I know we’d be happy there,Happier than ever before? The books reminded me of what,In our youth,We called literature. 2. The sentences I’ve just writtenTook it out of me.I searched for the words,And I resisted them as soon as I put them down. Now, listening to them again, what I hearIs not so much nostalgiaAs a love of beginning.…

Good Description Lord I am such a narcissist—I couldn’teven give a gooddescription, having been thinking onlyof myself and whatin my body was breaking and how unmendablethe break, thinking only ofmyself and with what archaic chargewas I complying, crying over and over no,as though to reduce confusionas to whether I’d given permission,when nobody, for that, would givepermission—I mean onlya true narcissist would expect to be faithfullyobeyed, and Lord Iam such a narcissist—I think I am socharming, so kittenish and cultured,uproarious at parties,enlivening conversations with my extensiveknowledge of strangling,how pressure around a person’s neckwill cause a contact lens to dislodge from the iris,making it hard to see, but that’s not funny,not funny to anyoneexcept the company that slicesand sells the lenses—they never turn downa market for replacements, so at leastsomebody’s smiling, snuggling…

1 I had stage fright before the baroqueof Rome, afraid some part of mewould get loose in the volutes and the cork-screwedcolumns like the minds of the melancholyarchitects that overshot the human. I was dizzy.I was thirsty. I didn’t know the bodyof words. I wanted something burnt or vocal orbent around the edges of things like lightwhen I saw the nuns and polizia pointabove to what? Lesser glory or newsof dread come down in the form of a manwith a feeling in a truck? Prince, they said,his voice descending through the gridof a speaker in the ceiling of the quickbar—the song goes on to insertseven swords in the virgin mother’s heart. 2 Was he Bernini or Borromini in the struggleof style to break free of god and gravity?Was he human…

If in time the book-boxes in the cellar liftedout of your mind and garnished mine, what I would seemost is the meshing of the universe, not even,as tradition from Sappho to Euclid calls it, lovebut another sprite more broken up as if mathematical—one part concept, one part computation,powered by a relationship with a pencilinside the knuckles of a person learning notto believe and to unknot belief into ratios,fractions, atomic ways of seeing,each grand time of lost purpose in cul-de-sacsis symmetrydepending on the hypothesis—something, not a feeling butprobably untestable, uncontestable maybe-truth—a character in a story that half-exists in the mind, you’d think(there, where you think (you think)) oh, this is not whatlove was supposed to be at all, it is breathing.Age catches up. Telescoped through boxed-up memorieswe think about stories: broken…

Vantablack All the animals you knowwill die. You set foodout for them anyway,let the oily seeds fallamong the fiddleheadsto be ground downpermanent as bone.The forest fills and unfills,drops itself down roottubes and turns to dark lace.One undoing: leafto sparrow, ghostly star.Or there is no death.Or the face death sets suckslight like that special paint, the onethat plunges and harms.They painted a barn that specialpaint, and the barn disappeared. Chat-Renard It is the halfness that confounds.What hunts livestock into legend,slips around doors into shadow,feline soundlessness. Vulpine appetite,gutting kitchens of their offal, ripeand bursting fruit, even breads heapedon warm stone. Amalgam of hotand heather, slinking throughthe landscape like a demon,soft, with provocative teeth. Whatstories they have for you: babiessnatched in the candled night, returnedand shifted behind the eyes, mewling newat darkness and…

Whole worlds on fire.A black ship in a red sky.I’d rather walk, but I don’t know the way.The hungrier we get, the longer the line.No page is ever empty.We sign it—Forgotten.One note at a time, throwing out the bugle.The crush of it all beneath the sound stage.Pop is an advance on the computers.Parasites line our intestines.The things we do for love.The rest of the time we’re alone. Alan Gilbert is the author of two books of poetry, The Treatment of Monuments and Late in the Antenna Fields, as well as a collection of essays, articles, and reviews entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight. Taneum Bambrick Vantage Vantage by Taneum Bambrick, winner of the 2019 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is available at APR’s website, www.aprweb.org, and at…

Obit: Poems by Victoria Chang Copper Canyon Press, 2020 $17.00 (paper) I’ve never asked myself what I would say about either of my parents—who, for the record, are still alive—if given the task of composing his or her obituary. Would I mention their professional accomplishments? Or the dreams they had, including the ones that never came true? How about something about the vacations we took to the lake south of Krakow when I was growing up? Looking back on someone’s life, one inevitably reexamines his own, both as the person who had shared their life with the deceased and as the person who’s suddenly been barred from enjoying that experience ever again. Grief can be so overpowering precisely because it swallows up everything in its path. Obit is Chang’s fit…