Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2016 i The American Poetry Review

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also . . . —Whitman When I drive by Manny’s motley townhouse in Graniteville, past windows through which I can barely read those three words wrought in cursive and hung simply on his family room wall, I cannot help but feel the twist of my own inadequate love, a cramp: Life, Laughter, Love. To judge is not to love. Yet, a sad decor strikes me as a moral misdeed. I loathe the shellacked print of a rose nailed above a leather loveseat, wince at the worn mass-manufactured quilt he and his soon-to-be-ex wife once dragged their bodies beneath. And though I’d never buy it, I can’t help but drive by it, must…

Parted on the Side Oh my God this girl fingers at knob when I left my home and my family I was only sixteen I left my home and my family moved to Baltimore I had never shaved a virgin pale as a ghost hair so brown looked black I thought the doors of sex would open up and take me I boxed my Henry Miller paperbacks my compact discs and cassettes this girl my God how she stood still she was moving in every molecule there was a flood of sunlight a great fire in the vestibule she fast at the little wheel I was going to live in her same building on North Charles the McCoy face every day the long lawn they called the beach that grandiose…

A Mercy It seemed, to me, a mercy, that he died “without a mark on him.” I don’t remember who told me that, maybe one of his roommates, who’d been in the car with him, and who’d come through unscathed. A month later, summer, they came to my home town, we drank Paisano, and smoked Abdullahs oval and pastel as Easter baskets (the morning of the accident). And last night, I heard the word windshield, and I suddenly wondered how he could have been thrown free of the car, to end up, curled up on the verge, dead, without a mark on him. And then for a moment I almost saw but I would not see him, fontanelle fi rst, being born up out of the glass into his fresh…

Where Other Worlds Exist & The Urge to Preserve What Once Was Good In the Center of Our Vision Is a Blind Spot Where Other Worlds Exist If the dead speak to us, they don’t Speak very clearly, although, Surely, the ancient teachers of their youth Bring the ruler down on the bare Bones of their hands, and the head master Hectors them with tales of failure and shame, And perhaps even in death, they look out Onto the leaves of some living tree And mumble their curses at the utter unfairness Of it all, and we catch, at the very edge Of our vision, a brief flutter of leaves. The Urge to Preserve What Once Was Good He was a forest in late Autumn, and all She could think…

A Life of the Mind Had a small idea Fed it custard & raw meat it grew Into theory Trained to attack Kept feeding it Grants, fellowships, Sleek sly Published papers It grew Horns, maxillary Canines, brass Balls, pseudo- Religious disser- Tation grub, footnote Fodder, schisms, Bitter parsing Retired to Swiss lake Chateau & drank Then drank More till death From congestive This & that Decayed In situ, turned To dust, very wise, very Fine, fine dust The Eschatologist Dreams His Children Going In and Out of Many Rooms It is this world that must be reconstituted, a massive labor beyond us. First, people fleeing in boats and cars and trains and on foot. Then stopped & asked for identification, though all are known by name. Then the errors opened…

Yes, I Hate America How electric // tidal // capitalism // crashes over us. Neon burial grounds // tumbling // through the border. That day I left // my ex-nothing // on Apache lands. He sold my memory // for mule // psychiatric garden. Yelling my ignorances // each fence erect // splooging! Surveillance cameras // shaking // skinhead passports. Border communities // patrolled // petroleum desires. This sweet & cherry // boy-pussy // is a great machine. How could I // leave // ethereal night // or etheridge? Feeling fucked up // no license // in the porn arcade. Hell is temperate // climate // compared to // this life Without you. [Somewhere in Los Angeles] This Poem Is Needed She charges her ankle bracelet // from the kitchen…

Pireeni Sundaralingam is co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (U. Arkansas Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 Northern California Book Award and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles book award. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Ploughshares and Prairie Schooner, anthologies such as W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century, and Amnesty International’s Fire in the Soul: 101 Poems for Human Rights, and has been translated into five languages. Sundaralingam was born in Sri Lanka, raised both there and in the UK, and now lives in California. Trained as a cognitive scientist at the University of Oxford, she is currently writing a non-fiction book on poetry and the brain, in addition to completing a poetry manuscript exploring her memories of the Sri Lankan…

Cartoon Music “Do I wish none of this happened? Yes.” —Governor Andrew Cuomo Why would she have said that, an undeserving egg, not to die for? Rainbow pencils retracted. Next, a group of officials withdrew support of accident forgiveness, and I’m like Comrade Fuzzy, my gaydar’s gone berserk the way it messes. Or say the response is tepid, or buttered ramekins. Color me brain foolish, on eye-drops—the history of his hounding. There, it’s not creepy, but it is. You can’t turn away or around from the birthday table with its glaces getting iconic around the benches understandably. We’re supposed to go out for the evening. David had saved some money and that stuff is now getting cold. Within the relative safety of the parterre it’ll make me sick today. You’re…

Ecobutch from Cornish just made me her favorite, which is more than I can say of Kitchenslut100 or 101. Ecoslut might be the one for me, and because of the wonders of wondering, I can click on pixels of my affection all night and see their private peccadilloes rise beneath my touch. One likes fisting, another vanilla ice cream licked from her hair. Where do people come from, where do they get fetishes for tomboys in stilettos? I don’t know what I like until I’ve seen it on a pillow 300 days in a row. It’s ok to wash the pillowcase as long as it spins in counterintuitive ways—we all have idiosyncrasies, if not mates. My notmates are many, and we share so much: birth month, love for loosefitting modifiers,…

Anima after David Bottoms I dream of up-picked wind, begrudged pines, bent-over, low like the moon in half water— the other half. A mystery greater than blindness, but deeper, jerks you, jerks me, but harder, into the water, the small lake, the deepest point, the drift. The nudged, the toward, middle, the letting. Without, cast and cast, I and the lake and I. Fishing: the wasn’t philosophy. Here’s an answer: pieces of simple, the aspects of perfect vision in quiet terms— to see yourself in a mirror—your eyes can’t conjugate or otherwise handle. Be that color of sky, blurry like handwriting at a distance. I don’t know everybody, but even the skeptics know that trembling stars on the water’s surface means you better sit your ass down. Sorrow from Far…

A Column AT AGE SEVEN, STANLEY MOSS ANNOUNCED TO HIS TEACHER that he knew he was destined to become a poet. Few other modern poets, if any, have been as exhaustive as Moss in mining the post-Whitman ore of a “Song of Myself” for so many decades. Ages seven to ninety. Today, for him to discover that his relentless ongoing “Poem of Self” has suddenly become “obsolete” leaves him with a cataclysmic void to be filled. And he finds that there is to be no turning back from this difficult crossroads in his art. Moss’s wide-ranging multitudinous self is perhaps best mirrored by his historic illumination of rings in the world’s oldest tree. He adopts the persona of poet-as-arborist, a magician kindred to Prospero in The Tempest, and he surveys…

Black Hills Not the abruptly slowing cars ahead, or the way traffic snarled to a standstill, not inching forward as the right lane merged with the left, not the blinking lights ahead, nor the ambulance sprawled sideways across the lanes; not the men and women huddled in the breakdown lane, not even the one automobile, turned over on its hood, door ajar. None of it stirred my son and his friend from their video game cocoon, never once looking up to see, happy in each other’s parallel play. (“It’s when you buy the moon,” one says to the other. “This game gets fun.”) And on the way back from the match, late afternoon light cutting sideways across the lanes, visor down to block the blare, I passed the exit for…

Avenger Behind 1600’s gates, the President sits bound to the presidency like a superhero sidekick, his mouth gagged by what “originalists” believe the constitution says. Live streams, meanwhile, pump night-green footage from Ferguson’s punctured lung into our timelines. Flash grenades gush like spangling stars from a flag drawn and quartered. I feel a vicarious smallness watching demonstrators flee. A boy has been murdered again. Again, an officer has judged a body’s rising, darkening, as breaching the threshold of menace (demon)— needing to be put down. Rage would be a word to fit in the mouth had the mouth not grown small from watching SWAT tanks quash demands for answers. The Attorney General—just a brown man reclined on a couch—watches it all and grows impatient with due process. Somewhere, at his…

Introduction A proletarian modernist, Lola Ridge is best known for her work published between 1918 and 1922, which coincided with her editorship of Broom and Others, and her salon in New York that hosted most of the leading poets of the time, including Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane. Four years before Eliot’s bleak and anti-Semitic “The Waste Land,” her equally long poem “The Ghetto” celebrated the “otherness” of the Jewish Lower East Side, chronicling an era and prophesying the multi-ethnic world of the twenty-first century. She was one of the first to delineate the life of the poor in Manhattan and, in particular, women’s lives in New York City. The title poem of her second book, Sun-up and Other Poems, is a striking modernist depiction of a…

Books It is always impressive to read of the dedication and conviction with which poets approach poetry, and of the immense faith many have for its regenerative powers. All the metaphors and modulations are in pursuit of fundamental connections, even correctives, of where the brute forces of existence attempt to shred our aspirations of humanism. Jorie Graham. From the New World: Poems 1976–2014. Ecco. Imagine this new Jorie Graham selection of poems as the perfect embodiment of the character of late-20th-century American poetry. And at the center of this Graham universe there are multiple characterizations about what it all adds up to. For sure, there’s Graham as inspiration for a generation of poets to write poems that have become improvisations of the mind, inquiries into thought that become suspended in…

Are you happy? Tell me what you’re thinking. You blink when you speak. That’s your tell. Everyone has a tell. Sitting in the red chair. In the corner of the family room which is not really a family room but a basement. The king sits in his basement throne. Red as a mouth. The whole room is a sham. It smells of the bleach I used to get mold spots off the wall. Behind the red chair. The wall looks as if I’ve taken an eraser to it. Tiny pencil points of mold remain. You’ve taken up smoking. You smell like an ashtray. That’s your tell. I can tell. I’m losing weight. I can’t eat. Hard time sleeping. Are you happy? I ask the obvious questions. That’s my tell. I’m…

Black Snow I live between the bus stop and something I can’t explain, between the night sounding with green leaves and a few visible stars, between a horse and philosophy wondering if it is a great clenched fist that keeps me from my life. Now I live between my mother’s death and my own. I close my eyes and see a different darkness. Under the trees wind falls through my hair. You were a place, mother. I’ve always wanted to be a place, a destination with a park bench. I’m afraid I’m only the weather. Night is miles off approaching like a storm. I’ve sat so long it is like traveling. I’ve watched the sun move out of the shade and the shade move into the sun. Flashlight I think…

Books IN THE GREAT ANNE WALDMAN’S COLlection of essays and other pieces, Outrider, she defines this term as a person who “rides the edge—parallel to the mainstream.” She goes on to say, “the outrider is a kind of shaman, the true spiritual ‘insider.’ . . . The shaman travels to edges of madness and death and comes back to tell the stories.” For this installment of this column, I’ll be discussing work by the poets who ride this edge: poets whose work is like—and has always been like—a radio receiving transmissions from outer space or the afterlife, as poet Jack Spicer (himself a definite outrider) would say. Or you could call them mystics, or visionaries, or even old hippies (and I mean that as high praise). Before we dive into…

BLACK LIGHT, GALWAY KINNELL’S ONE novel, was published in 1966. It came into existence because he had, as a young poet, spent most of a year in Iran in 1959 as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Tehran and stayed on for another six months as a journalist writing short articles about the country for an Englishlanguage newspaper. Reading the book again recently, after its author’s death in October 2014, I was struck once more by its originality and ferocity. And found myself looking in it somewhat more urgently for Galway Kinnell, and wondering— especially in these days when Iran is so much in the headlines—about how its young author came to the place—psychically, geographically— where it was written. There were not many road markers in the 1950s for…