March 23, 2022 Poetry Remembrance Day By Spencer Matheson Illustration by Alex Merto. Spencer Matheson is a novelist and poet. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions. He lives in Paris, and teaches at the École normale supérieure.
March 4, 2022 Poetry The One Who Happened By Xi Chuan Illustration by Thomas Colligan. He happened to hear the world was square, like the square table at home that could be used for eating or playing cards on. He happened to hear that the emperor is made so by divine right, but he was just a commoner so that’s nothing. He happened to have not heard of Hitler; that guy with a little mustache avoided him for nineteen years. He happened to have not heard of the Cultural Revolution, and looked at himself in the mirror in a positive light. Read More
December 15, 2021 Poetry Two Poems By Kathleen Ossip Illustration by Anna Bak-Kvapil Henry Hudson Wood is a masculine substance. Witness the Arts and Crafts movement, the men at the helm of it. Witness, for that matter, this room: Oak floor, oak walls, oaken ceiling. The air-conditioning grate ersatz oak. The slats of the ceiling fan oak veneer. The table I write on, particleboard with no pretense to oak, oak’s sad cousin. And the craftsman-style light fixtures, triangles, right angles, dreamed up in the minds of geometers. What does geometry illuminate? I’m the sad cousin of a mind. Read More
December 9, 2021 Poetry Two Self-Portraits By Tove Ditlevsen Illustration by Na Kim Self-Portrait 1 I cannot: cook pull off a hat entertain wear jewelry arrange flowers remember appointments send thank-you cards leave the right tip keep a man feign interest at parent-teacher conferences. I cannot stop: smoking drinking eating chocolate stealing umbrellas oversleeping forgetting to remember birthdays and to clean my nails. Telling people what they want to hear spilling secrets loving strange places and psychopaths. I can: be alone do the dishes read books form sentences listen and be happy without feeling guilty. Read More
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