Poetry |
“Interview With Gertrude Stein” and “Interview With Anne Carson”
What’s the point of loving others? AC: “There is a black planet speeding towards us.” (Glass, Irony and God)
Essay |
“In the Garden of Uncertainty”
“I tried to make peace with the fact that my body still had the upper hand, as there was no way to address whether a cancer cell from the original cluster of cells might have stowed away on a blood vessel bound for a distant port.”
Poetry |
“A Walk with Frank O’Hara”
“… debonair in white flannels, a small notebook / in one pocket, an egg and tomato / sandwich wrapped in wax paper in another.”
Essay |
“The Explosion”
“Right after the explosion, the newspaper interviewed me. So did a lawyer. He was seeking damages on behalf of the victims. The newspaper article reported that I had run into the house, though I had only gone under the carport.”
Poetry |
“Apart”
“… and here a man, his sudden awareness: / duration is patience preserving / presence through the ongoing, the violence.”
Essay |
“Robert Musil & the Crisis of the Artist in Times of Ideological Polarization — the 1920s & 2020s”
“His attempts to bear witness, his notes for articles never published, the speeches he actually dared to give … show Musil struggling mightily under the strained tug of war between reality and possibility, freedom and censorship, fear and bravery.”
Poetry |
“Replay,” “Things We Believe as Children” and “The Séance”
“My spilled-milk / dress spreads around me / and does anyone send a net out / to catch me, to pull me to the surface?”
Fiction |
“Collaboration Incidents” and “Liz Phair, unexiled”
“Once, Beatriz had loved. Now she was transcended by the Paradise she privileged into an action that humans could not name. It made her whitehot, and everybody saw it.”
Poetry |
“Radical Domesticity”
Essay |
“How Poems Change Us”
“I think of a poem’s shifts or transitions as tectonic … gliding plates that adjust and change the ground one stands on but with the acceptance of an embrace.”
Poetry |
“These nocturnal voices in shrubs,” “Fig and orange trees,” “Heroic deeds,” “Distance fades” & “Homeland laid bare”
“Homeland laid bare / at the base of memory // From afar, its forsaken shadow that trails / up to the border of wandering …”
Essay |
“The Value of Fear: Why We Should Listen to Robert Frost During the Pandemic”
“Frost doesn’t write about overcoming fear. He writes about experiencing it and then making decisions based on the evidence.”
Poetry |
“Ferryboats”
“If you don’t like your story, drop it in, / and if the waves don’t smooth it clean, then nothing will: / sweeping off each broken word in salty swells …”