A thing from which sweet lips were wont to drinkPours down a storm of rattling hail and rain;All pleasures sicken, and all glories sink:I am drawn nightward; I must strive againTo give into the air my quiet breath;For well we know no hand of blood and boneDull with the dullness of grief and deathAttends the …
Month: March 2024
Marjorie Perloff, Leading Scholar of Avant-Garde Poetry, Dies at 92
The obituary is behind the NYT paywall, but most know how to get around that. She is the only critic I still read on a regular basis after retiring from teaching English. Very few have lasting value -- none of the ones who are know for "theory" as opposed to criticism. Unlike most of those …
Continue reading Marjorie Perloff, Leading Scholar of Avant-Garde Poetry, Dies at 92
The Blight at the End of the Story
After the house died, the blight came for the furniture next. The couches and divans lacked hands to turn the doorknobs, so all they could do was stamp around nervously. The blight touched their edges and spread over them until they too were dead. Next, it reached out for the air. Wispy tendrils of gray …
Poet discusses his erasure of black stories in new poem collection, “Occupy Blackness”
Scattered words and white spaces. That’s what it looks like to flip through Midland Poet Laureate Joseph Wilson’s newest book, Occupy Blackness. The book is a collection of short poems and essays that Wilson wrote using a technique he calls hybrid erasure. In this interview, he talks about his process writing the book, using his …
The Swine-Dark Sea
The sacred fish, a foot in scale, its long lower jaw the lip of a sandal floating ahead of the toes, disappeared in the years since the drought. No more to yawn forth silver shekels to tax the temple No more to navigate the waters turned wine-dark beneath men of strange speech No more to …
Jedediah Smith 