The American Poetry Review articles from July 2005

The American Poetry Review archives from July 2005

An Oddness.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... A scent rather quietly loves the library. Readers look up: a life of paper inside the great Life: scent of greenly ravished civilization~ dream of inspiration freed. When a book is lifted from horizon's steel that mystery object...

Silent Reading.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Thought makes tablets Ruins cry stone Pounded reeds Cracked bone prophecies Home's cuneiform One soonday Caesar burns scrolls vellum vines riddles Thought becomes stylish Saved by syntax Augustine loves Alypius October the birdbacked...

A Nextopia.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Past modernisms, a library smells spicy, spicy and tuneful--a treble clef on its side. Readers touch each book's crowded energies with wind whirled fingers, a personal blond number on its spine. Sleeves brush complete works by...

Library Dust.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Thoughts are odd Even normal thoughts Nature within nature Vowels where sex- cries recover An oddness made your book a world The whisper furnace blows bent crackly motes through readers' delft blue auras Were you afraid your book...

Reference-Room Aura.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... An aura survives the discipline of a flower, goes back to the fertile Tree, knowing you are aware: around each letter of a book trial colors of a heart. In terror or trusted mildness the Tree prepared. Readers at praxis screens move...

Dust Acolytes.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Who has come? What ironfoot iliad girl approaches the PS's, her weathers locked in grey flame? A steep scent sends energy back through the fate myth. Readers walk mazedly carrying your book ~ Did you love paper more than people?...

Fourth-floor Hecatomb.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Air in the stretched therefore part of the library smells like the back of a mask. Glue from meal & bone cooked in iron pots. In epics, this always happens~ mixtures of research & rural, searchful frass & some might say used god...

Brittle Economics Monographs.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Readers are crying in the HF's; the epoch of paper loses breath: graphs and maps, prone algebra swiggles; knowledge is lonely since meaning left. A seaquake dire & sleety marx boy passes holding your book (might pass might hold) its...

Platonic Oxygen.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... What is thought Is it breath Were you breath Was paper skin Turns out there's a bug that eats book glue birth slash death of knowledge in its body Readers rest on backpacks An isis in corduroy Crimson kierkegaard on her lap Dust...

Restless Auras.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... The idea of auras being uneven Gleam starts crowding the readers' eyes A local spinning round each consonant Talking ceases in it Did you not also swerve to avoid hubcaps from a masterpiece Tired readers use invisibilities Aporias...

Dust Dialectical.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Learning to see extra light over heads of readers when sitting using blur techniques. Late auras are being swept out. In the library stacks, a flexidrama: these yellow rooms excite the sun. Dust comes from galaxies, each mote bent at...

Epoch of Dust.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Thought has life Day made samples Library lamps gold outly like a prom going dim & dust sails into the public sphere I should not mind a mote might say An aisle away the squeak of running shoes Squeak thump Your page is almost...

String Theory Sutra.(thirteen poems)(Poem)
July 1, 2005... There are so many types of "personal" in poetry. The "I" is the thread, of course, is shadow. In writing of experience or beauty, from a twin existence. It's July 4: air is full of mistaken make when folded into fabric meant never to touch...

Heroine.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Then Jane says: there is an invisible thread between Our hearts that can never be broken and Rochester Goes on acting tortured; doomed soon to re-negotiate his own contract with the visible. So the happy ending relies as always, on...

Camilla.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... My father first threw me across water, an infant, pinned to a javelin. In the warrior dream of the risen body, heaven is a precinct of sweetmeats and dancing girls. My heaven was constant flight. He threw me skyward, so that I would...

Request Radio.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... It's the aftermath of surrender: after the wound big as the sky. All the sentries bowing, The loud blood pouring into The gutter of morning. Here The body stops echoing The heart's monologue, the Heart's non-stop mimicking ...

White Nights, St. Petersburg.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... The apricot light of dying day, Pungent and bitter-- under a pale day-moon. The sun sets for five minutes, ten. Then pops up again, like a child playing games over the canal of death. Men in black aim their cell phones like...

The Last Time.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... The last time I saw him awake and talking I tricked my aging father. He was on a Jewish kick--the Jews & Germans-- the way his mind might fix on anything-- on golf, North Africa, on fruit, and stick to it. The day he pointed to a...

Among the Dead.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... They are swelling by leaps and bounds, the ranks of the dead-- Peter the tailor, and Mr. Papastrat our kindly landlord who grew a garden of Eden from an old coffee tin, and one fierce ghost clamping a pipe in his teeth still spreads...

Trafficking in the radiant: the spiritualization of American poetry.(Column)
July 1, 2005... "It's not possible to be sated with the world. I'm still insatiable," he said. "At my age, I'm still looking for a form, for a language to express the world." --interview with Czeslaw Milosz AT ONE TIME, PERHAPS THANKS TO NEW...

To Pavese.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... The city will appear before you as otherworldly, inviting only to those who suffer. The dog tethered to the pole stares at forms that move with such muscle, ease. No thoughts impede their shapes. There is kindness still and what...

Lazarus, Come Out.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... The sisters are wailing, quite beside themselves with something new. The pale Christ, lanky as a long-distance runner, seems half-amazed at what he has done. Sitting up, the awakened one sees the immobile face of the woman he mounted...

Travel Is a Dream You Do Not Come Out Of.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... I wonder if Orpheus who returned from the land of the dead and Odysseus who returned to the island of Ithaca both woke from a dream the vomit of dreams that jumps out of a computer too like a frog a bell is attached to the brain of...

Toward Some Bright Moment.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Was she drunk? She didn't seem drunk, had only staggered a little, stumbling over the curb-- a blind woman on the corner of Broadway and Fourth, kicking her dog, a mutt German shepherd, missing half the time, and then hitting with a...

The Balance.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Red-eyed men and harridans--Cain and his brood trudge across the desert waste, lugging a pallet with Cain's wife and brats perched on heaps of fetid pelts. You know it's hot and they missed lunch--rocks and yellow dirt, no water in...

Learning to Cope.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Adrift on his back in the tub, the boy detects the tip of his pre-pubescent prick as it pokes up above the surface of the water not unlike the conning tower of U-boat Number 88 during its mad flight for Buenos Aires after the German...

Writing light.(In the Studio)
July 1, 2005... I SOMETIMES THINK THE STORY OF DANAE IS about money. Father ineptly deposits daughter into vault sunk in front yard. Con man Zeus breaks in and Danae becomes purse to her own coin, son Perseus. Who after many adventures--most famously,...

An introduction to twelve letters by James Wright.(A Selection of Letters: A Special APR Supplement)
July 1, 2005... JAMES WRIGHT'S LETTERS CHRONICLE MANY of the major innovations in American poetry in the middle of the twentieth century. They also provide a compelling personal narrative of his life. The following selection is taken from the forthcoming...

Selections from The Triumph of Agriculture.
July 1, 2005... NIKOLAI ZABOLOTSKY (1903-1958) STARTED off as a member of the Leningrad avant-garde group OBERIU, which also included Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms. His first book, Stolbtsy or Columns (1929), a very tight, visual work with cubofuturist...

Summer.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... God moves mysterious thunderheads over the towns and office buildings, cracks them open like raw eggs. The north has critical humidity. The south plucks at its sweaty clothes. The weatherman says it's August, and a sniper is haunting...

In the Open Field.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... That man in the field staring at the sky without the excuse of a dog or a rifle--there must be a reason why I've put him there. Only moments ago, he didn't exist. He might be claiming this field as his own, centering himself in it...

The insistence of beauty.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... The day before those silver planes came out of the perfect blue, I was struck by the beauty of pollution rising from smokestacks near Newark, gray and white ribbons of it on their way to evanescence. And at impact, no doubt,...

Holiday Madness, 1976.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... At Christmas I opened many Battery-operated gifts. Where are the batteries? On Monday The bank teller Tells me That Norbert Wiener is the Anti-Christ. But who is Norbert Wiener? Tuesday the voices Tell me to clean up The...

How It Will End (Previously Recorded).(Poem)
July 1, 2005... In the end There will be no witnesses, As far as we know. But there are no guarantees. In the final entropy Of the last 400 million years, The time it will take for the life Of all radioactive substances to expire, The incessant...

Ixion.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Someone is always dying of cancer, Someone is always reading The New York Times. After your mother died, We found love letters in the attic. I know, I know. She was tortured in the camps. Do you remember those once white hands? Do you...

Video Confession on Vacation in New York City.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... It has been a nice vacation In New York City, Sitting in the bathroom, with two Silent angels. Those blue hands would Almost match the faded roses in the Other room. Unforgettable. Lifeless. Like hair growing underneath your skin....

Going to Hell.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... Traveling through the frozen mud Between cigarettes, Teeth and bones Suspended in the ice, We wash the fish When the Devil comes. There is no singing. There is no dancing. It's dark in the machine. His name is my name too. ...

Along an ancient thought-tree.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... As light stripes a tree-trunk, heat streams through the ashes, steam puffs from lips on its trip to others, attended by phrases, so a thought about bark, a crowd and a bonfire slips off to serve as a prop in the Theater of Shades. ...

Crater.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... In December nineteen ninety-nine we stood on the rim of a snow-white crater. Who's the "we" in mind? From Peter a bunch of guys (two or three, maybe five) surrounding a hole in the haze. Out of the fog and greenery around us the...

Fuga et Vita.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... 1 The only thing that was is gone, as blood is gone, as spit gone from the tongue, from eyes the salty moisture dried, a shade slipped from the room, no scar is left, no seam, on the wall a switch clicked once, out went the light. ...

June Twelfth.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... June twelfth--the day is calm, clear, forecasting nothing that hasn't happened yesterday and every June--except for historical events, of course, one day of which I witnessed in 41: overcast but not gloomy, not cold but chilly; most...

On the road, touch and go, with D. H. Lawrence.
July 1, 2005... "There are blows in life, so powerful... I don't know!" --Cesar Vallejo, trans. Clayton Eshleman I DIDN'T WANT TO, BUT FOR REASONS THAT will become abundantly clear, I'm forced to begin at the beginning, at the sources that gave rise...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2005... TO THE EDITORS, Dear Editors, I would like to point out a mistake that was printed in the interview with Quincy Troupe in the March/April 2005 issue of APR. Mr. Troupe and the interviewer were discussing two different organizations,...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
July 1, 2005... The editors regret that the following poems, which were cited in David Rivard's essay "Resistance to the Unreal: Michael Ryan's New and Selected Poems" in the May/June 2005 issue, contained typographical errors. They appear here correctly: ...

The Rain.(Poem)
July 1, 2005... All night the sound had come back again, and again falls this quiet, persistent rain. What am I to do with myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often? Is it that never the ease, even the hardness, of rain...