TRAIN TO IZMIR (January 2012)
Low hanging cloud cover,
plowed fields, squat trees, crouched stone
station where we enter
a town, electrical
lines, satellite TV
antennas, a distant
minaret, hills either
side of the platform, grave
markers among tall grass,
a circling river, bridge
over it, half-built
homes nearby — we peer in.
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A VISIT TO GLOUCESTER
I take SPACE to be the central fact to man
born in America, from Folsom Cave to now.
I spell it large because it comes large here.
Large, and without mercy. - Charles Olson
I look out on the vast, flat sea
from hills behind a bog winding
down to a sandy inlet, shore
beyond it, open to the sun —
and now know why space is the fact
of our lives and why, a large man,
he needed a large page to write
that language, an unkempt story.
Scratched into a notebook or scrawled
on the walls of his apartment,
the words inhabit a place, find
the will in ocean, continent—
set directions from the harbor
for “islands hidden in the blood”
or, water at his back, the peopled
land glimpsed “from this place where I am.”
2 July 2012
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BURT KIMMELMAN‘s seventh collection of poems, The Way We Live (Dos Madres Press) appeared in late 2011. For over a decade he was Senior Editor of the now defunct Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. In addition to his poetry, he has published five books of literary criticism, two of them monographs including The “Winter Mind”: William Bronk and American Letters (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), and more than eighty articles on medieval, modern, and contemporary poetry. “Taking Dinner to My Mother,” a poem from his collection, As If Free (Talisman House, 2009), was featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. Recent interviews of Kimmelman are available online: with Tom Fink in Jacket2 (text), and with George Spencer at Poetry Thin Air (video). More on Kimmelman can be found most recently at “Burt Kimmelman: A Survey” (critical commentary and poetry samples selected by Karl Young, a part of his Light & Dust Poetry Anthology) as well as at BurtKimmelman.com.