Essay |
“Conserving Michelangelo”
“A diagonal tear crosses from the arches on the left to the robe of the figure on the right, then disappears — as if a bird had suddenly flown through Michelangelo’s studio and he, taking its path for a sign, had put it in.”
Essay |
“I Thee Wed”
“‘Who was she?’ Mom screamed over and over. I rolled out of bed and stood in the doorway just in time to see Dad slap her hard across the face. He slapped her again.”
Essay |
“Fermi’s Interaction”
“My father was working towards his Ph.D. in Chemistry, with ventures into bio-chem, and he was part of handful of students who were studying with Enrico Fermi, who had recently arrived at Columbia, a year after winning the Nobel Prize for his discovery of slow neutrons …”
Essay |
“The Folly of Existing”
“Consider the command: ‘Do as I say and you will reap the reward.’ We hear these words often; what we do not know, what Abraham himself could not know with certainty, is who speaks to us thus. Is it God or Satan?”
Essay |
on “Poems Not Written” — a recurring feature On The Seawall
“A poet’s job, if we can call it a job, is not to be a stenographer, recording in blunt shorthand terrible moments … so culpability might be determined. A poet’s job is to remind us of the networks along which feeling — traumatic and otherwise — travels and oftentimes warps: cellular, familial, temporal, sociocultural, historical.”
Essay |
“My Piano Teacher Talks to God”
“It always took me a while to readjust from my fake piano to Ms. Kim’s real and very beautiful piano each week at the start of my lessons. But once I got into it, I was pretty good.”
Essay |
“Innavigable Sea”
“A gaze that, never leering, still seems to undress me, to see something of my insides that should be left there behind my eyes.”
Essay |
“The Weather Brewer”
“The whacks, the wallops, burning the underside of an arm, the rake of one ringed hand along a ridge of boy-skin — all of these were consistent in exceeding their ostensible cause.”
Essay |
“The Mariner” and “Mauve”: from Plastic: An Autobiography
“He underestimated desire, the frenzy of passion for the glittering Empress in her cage of color. Perkin had found the first product with global demand to be made from coal tar. His discovery opened the way for drugs, fertilizers, and plastic …”
Essay |
on “Poems Not Written” — a recurring feature On The Seawall
“So I sit down to write, and then that thing that I’ve just seen or that has just happened, moves away from me. The proximate thing, it turns out, is a hard thing to see.”
Essay |
on “Poems Not Written” / a recurring feature On The Seawall
“My unwritten poem haunted me like an unsolved murder, a cold case in law enforcement reopened with new evidence, interrogating the forensics of my imagination. Who or what was the culprit?”
Essay |
“Mirena”
“Thirty years later, here I lie with a blue-gloved OB-GYN between my legs, who clasps you by your polyethylene threads as if you were a two-hooked lure, and I, a big-game fish …”
Essay |
“Let Us Once Again Praise Creative Writing Workshops”
“For the aspiring poet and teacher of poetry, what better field placement can there be than assimilating the subtle, helpful, and uncompromising critiques of one’s own drafts, as well as one’s classmates’ drafts, by poets of rare accomplishment?”
Essay |
“Assembled”
“Chaos theory says that things are difficult to control, unpredictable. Sometimes, trauma can be a quiet, quick wave of a hand. Nearly undetectable … Sometimes, it is the sound of car doors slamming an end to the conversation.”
Essay |
“Trash”
“That afternoon, I wrote on the board: Lucille Clifton said she wanted to write a poetry that would comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”