March 21, 2017 Poetry Now By Frederick Seidel Photo: Arun Kulshreshtha For Robert Silvers And you could say we’ve been living in clover From Walt Whitman to Barack Obama. Now a dictatorship of vicious spineless slimes We the people voted in has taken over. Once we’d abolished slavery, we lived in clover, From sea to shining sea, even in terrible times. It’s over. Read More
November 10, 2016 Poetry Don’t Make a Movie About Me By Johnny Cash This month, Blue Rider Press will publish Forever Words: The Unknown Poems of Johnny Cash. Compiled from a mountain of Cash’s handwritten poetry (all unpublished), the work in Forever Words spans the many stages of Cash’s career. “Don’t Make a Movie About Me” is one of many pieces within that reflect Cash’s “humorous strand,” poet Paul Muldoon writes in his introduction. It reflects “Cash’s own ambivalence about celebrity and the associated tabloid slobbering.” From the cover of Out Among the Stars. Christmas 1982 If anybody made a movie out of my life I wouldn’t like it, but I’d watch it twice If they halfway tried to do it right There’d be forty screen writers workin’ day and niteThey’d need a research team from Uncle Sam And go from David Allen Coe to Billy Graham It would run ten days in the final cut And that would mean leaving out the gossip smutAnd I do request for my children’s sake Don’t ever let ’em do a new re-make The thing I’m sayin’ is, don’t you see, Don’t make a movie ’bout me Even for T.V. Don’t make a movie ’bout me Read More
April 22, 2016 Poetry “Purple Elegy” By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Dearly beloved, this is what it sounds Like when you become a symbol through sound That roreth of the crying and the soun: You give up all your shit, down to the sou, Wade through raspberry death to find him so You can remind yourself he once was Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s second book of poems, Heaven, was published last year. He is the recipient of the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and is shortlisted for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize.
April 19, 2016 Poetry Two Poems By Nathaniel Mackey To celebrate our event tomorrow with Nathaniel Mackey at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, we’re publishing two poems from his latest collection, Blue Fasa. Read More
March 31, 2016 On Poetry A Major Poet of Quiet By Ben Lerner On Keith Waldrop. Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop. Photo: Walt Odets. Keith Waldrop is a quiet major poet, a major poet of quiet. His accomplishment is difficult to describe because his work refuses, in Bartleby-like fashion, the twin traps of impassivity and affectation: “On my one hand, / stasis – on the / other, striving for effect.” In one of his very few interviews, Waldrop says: “I think the worst fault a poem can have is striving for effect.” Waldrop never strives; instead, he haunts—his presence is all the more powerful for barely being there, like a ghost you discover in a familiar photograph. There are plenty of direct statements, moments of humor and pathos, but we come to know Waldrop most through his subtle, exquisite compositional decisions: the way he breaks a line or collages found language. I think here of the perfectly balanced epigrammatic poem “Proposition II”: Each grain of sand has its architecture, but a desert displays the structure of the wind. Read More
March 21, 2016 On Poetry That Inescapable Animal By Craig Morgan Teicher On Delmore Schwartz’s “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.” Delmore Schwartz, date unknown. “the withness of the body” The heavy bear who goes with me,A manifold honey to smear his face,Clumsy and lumbering here and there,The central ton of every place,The hungry beating brutish oneIn love with candy, anger, and sleep,Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,Climbs the building, kicks the football,Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city. Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,That heavy bear who sleeps with me,Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,Howls in his sleep because the tight-ropeTrembles and shows the darkness beneath.—The strutting show-off is terrified,Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,Trembles to think that his quivering meatMust finally wince to nothing at all. That inescapable animal walks with me,Has followed me since the black womb held,Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,A caricature, a swollen shadow,A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,The secret life of belly and bone,Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,Stretches to embrace the very dearWith whom I would walk without him near,Touches her grossly, although a wordWould bare my heart and make me clear,Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fedDragging me with him in his mouthing care,Amid the hundred million of his kind,The scrimmage of appetite everywhere. Read More