"On the Seawall" - Ron Slate's Blog

The protagonist of Peter Stamm’s fifth novel, On A Day Like This, is a forty-year old Swiss named Andreas who lives alone in Paris, teaches German at a suburban high school, and carries on a series of dispassionate affairs with women.

Through a stroke of good fortune, I was in Portland, Oregon on April 20 when Paulann Petersen hosted an event to celebrate the publication of Floyd Skloot’s Selected Poems.

As a Harvard undergraduate in 1995, Sarah Manguso contracted a neurological disease called chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy or CDIF, though her illness was initially misdiagnosed. “My disease has two steps,” she writes. “The immune system secretes antibodies into the blood. Then the blood delivers the antibodies to the peripheral neurons.

I enrolled in ROTC in September, 1968, but I don’t remember why, or what it felt like to make that decision. All I can dredge up are scattered images. But the story is notorious among my family and friends who retell it, adding nuances and imputations along the way. Their narrative constitutes my memory.

The eleven-part poem “Fern-Texts” that completes Reginald Gibbon’s eighth book of poems, Creatures of a Day, begins with a passage from the notebooks of Coleridge. This entry from 1804 describes “two sorts of talkative fellows”: