Friday Pick: Elizabeth Knapp’s “Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak”
Joshua Weiner
They are together, finally, in each other's arms, new lovers joined by the need to be consoled, the need to console.
Paul Batchelor
A world much like our own, mistempered & twi-natured, three-fold purgatorial zone / where Lord Hearsay sits with all his might upon the tallest, narrowest chair, the barstool throne
Stephanie Burt’s Advice from the Lights | Friday Pick
Burt’s riddles are a clever solution to the problem of how to communicate specific personal experience in a way that maintains a modicum of the universal, a problem she has explored in her criticism.
Elizabeth Knapp
In this life, I should have been most happy. Nary a care in the world, save for the constant pressure of having to marry the need for a mate with a tune.
Elizabeth Knapp
Tonight the cicadas are deafening. / Nothing to do but lean into despair / the way one leans into a mirror.
Four Elegies by Richard Jackson
In a series of moving elegies, Richard Jackson remembers four friends who died in the past year: Tomaž Šalamun, Tomas Tranströmer, James Tate, and Aleš Debeljak
Gift and Gear: The Work of Thomas McGrath
Twenty five years ago, when I was still just learning how to write a poem, and trying to locate the deeper sources for the poetry I wanted to write, Thomas McGrath’s example stood as a sign post. Here was a poet who could write any kind of poem he wanted ...
Friday Pick: Joseph Massey’s To Keep Time
Usually when poetry turns to the individual and the spirit, it includes love, but Massey lacks even this. There are no accounts of relationships, no “I love her” and “she loves me”. But many other types of relationships are described ...
THE POEM: Jacek Gutorow on John Ashbery’s “The One Thing That Can Save America”
Definitely, [the one thing that can save America] is not a thing that can be found and grasped or a message to be sent and read. It is more of a process that we can enjoy in all its inconclusiveness."