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“A Feast Afloat”
“Aboard our family’s 35-foot Ohlson yawl, Carousel, my mother was St. George to the alcohol stove’s dragon. She fought valiant battles to light it, at times igniting billows of blue flame and shrieking and cursing at it like the true salt she was.”
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“Hand With Head”
“Art’s development, like culture in general, is anchored in a system of interconnected realities none of which is fully controlled and explained by rationality and linear causality.”
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“On Naive and Sentimental Poetics: an Introduction, with reference to Rachel Blau DuPlessis”
On Naive and Sentimental Poetics: an Introduction, with Reference to Rachel Blau DuPlessis I don’t know how to write about poetry. That’s where I begin. I write poems, but I’ve never been what’s called a “poet-critic.” And I do write something resembling scholarship, but my scholarly work has never been about poetry. So, I…
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“All Elegy: What Are Poems for in a Destitute Time?”
“I find myself asking, what can a poem possibly do to confront or alleviate or expose the climate crisis? How can the poem possibly avoid the hazard of merely “making us aware,” an increasingly helpless and self-indulgent realization.”
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“Appraisal”
“Having clipped it from the classifieds, my mother showed us the ad: Cash for Class Rings — This Weekend Only. Most households still subscribed to daily newspapers then, retrieving the bundles from lawns or landings and yanking off green rubber bands to flatten them out before reading.”
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“Bad Seeds”
“Pop a seed into your mouth and you enjoy an elfin sip of its juice, tart and sweet at the same time. In an instant, the pleasure is gone and you’re left with only the white core, bitter and unpleasant to chew.”
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“History” and “Warranty”
“After years of couples counseling, we finally bought a new mattress. After the first night, he said he didn’t like it and went back onto the mattress in the guest room. And I felt relieved.”
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“Unmoored: A Meditation”
“Weeks have passed since the evening explosion in a neighbor’s attached garage, the fire that followed consuming the bulk of their house before the volunteer firemen’s hoses were even unspooled.”
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“The Water Lot”
“Stories were the common currency in lumber camp, kitchen, and barn. Tink, who began logging at 13 years old and weighing 108 pounds, blessed our family with a lot of those tales.”
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“Windows”
“Jim and I had restored many double hung wood windows during the time we worked together. We had also become pretty good friends, and then partners in a small but fairly successful restoration business.”
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“When I Get Botox I Think of Bees”
“It’s in my blood, migraine: in the genetic messages encoded in my cells — inherited flips switched, triggers tripped — inevitable. In the inextricable link between my headaches and monthly bleeds.”
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“Rearranging Max Eastman’s Library”
“My task was straightforward: to create some kind of order that would render this collection usable again for faculty members staying there for fellowships or research leaves, while also sorting out items that shouldn’t be there.”
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“Better Not to Say: Apology in Poetry”
“The present cultural moment in the US does not seem receptive to the inevitability of discomfort as it pertains to living with one another and of letting each other move on, or get on, with their lives … there is always someone looking to hold another to account and/or demand them to apologize publicly.”
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“Coming Back to the Page 101 Times,” an excerpt from Craft
“My struggle with meditation taught me an important lesson about my creative process: the imagination flourishes in that split-second before the editorializing and judgmental mind intrudes.”
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“I see a postman everywhere”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Postcards
“Bishop often mailed postcards from locales while expressing a longing, on the written (verso) side, to be elsewhere. Or she editorialized the postcard’s depiction of her location, adding captions, often ironizing or qualifying it.”