Interview |
“Structure with the Mystery”: A Conversation with Gail Mazur
“I’m grateful when the poem begins with an urgent impulse. Not just the urgency of getting to work, but that the poem is starting already, and you’ve got to get where you can write it, which isn’t always ‘convenient,’ but you have no choice, you’re in it!”
Poetry |
“Three Months Before My Mother Died We Went to Dollywood,” “At Home” & “Fourteen Mondays”
“The picture we used for the obituary / was one I took across the table at the restaurant / where she took me for my birthday. / It burned down the winter after she died.”
Essay |
“Art of Revision / Act of War”
“A Russian colleague took me to a restaurant with Soviet decor and menu. He entertained me with stories from his Soviet past. A show for the visiting American.”
Fiction |
from Monsters Like Us
“Viktor will remember France as if he were looking through binoculars, just held the wrong way around. The numbers in the lift of the Clara Schumann Hospital are absolutely clear as he goes up the five floors to Surgery II.”
Poetry |
“Recipes, Logistics,” “Divine Mushroom,” “Saucer and Cup,” “Giant Black Bear” & “Encores”
“… things that are true in their own rights, springing up after rains, and have no need of my understanding to complete them, nor have they any use for appraisals of their worth …”
Poetry |
“But maybe …” “So it’s said …” “For a long time …” “Line like …” “Deep inside …” & “Behind the lips …”
“Behind the lips / the unutterable waits / tears at the umbilical cords / of words // the martyr’s death of the alphabet / in the mouth’s urn / spiritual ascension / out of searing pain –“
Fiction |
“Cape Flyaway”
“How long had they been searching for land on this voyage? His eyes ached and burned from strain and wind and salt and sun. And he had seen it, he knew, he had seen land …”
Poetry |
“Late Work in Early Winter”
“I felled an ash yesterday that dropped / in the stream below the house with a thud / my neighbor heard from across his field where he / was digging postholes for a fence …”
Poetry |
“Tea With Yak Milk”
“Just a cold / morning and a small group of men // except me // and maybe the body they carefully place / on bare rock …”
Poetry |
“Bridge/Insurrection,” “On Sundays They Shoot at Nothing” & “Ideas”
“I wanted to howl. Maybe I wanted to kill but I knew where the fences were. I licked salt from the rails, swished my tail, ruminated.”
Essay |
“One Word Makes A World”
“ ‘Every word matters’ goes the truism, which ought to prove true with the greatest poems (or at least the greatest lyric poems); but does it, if put to the test? … I’m thinking about writing in which one word releases an entirely new way of reading it, otherwise unavailable.”
Poetry |
“My Lost Generation”
“The last onionskin, Wite-Out, / and carbon paper led to the last of Miss Rossiter, // said to be reading palms in LA.”
Essay |
“The Novella: Some Thoughts About the Uncanny Genre”
“When we’ve finished reading a novella, we may be left a bit bereft, even bewildered. Yet if the novella were any longer, the plot might lose the ambiguity, the stroke of irrationality, the heightened state of tension that novellas make possible.”
Poetry |
“Girl Walking Uphill in Darkness (Nine Inquiries)” and “Abysmal Zone”
“if every morning I move the complete contents of one drawer to another drawer / if every day full / becomes empty / do I need a lock / do I need to tell someone / the combination …”
Essay |
“Washington, DC” and “Mars”
“Although today they aren’t as central to his legacy, Noguchi sculpted many heads. In the early years, they made up the greater part of his practice.”