Selections from Gaspard de la Nuit
And I wondered if I was awake or asleep, if it was the moon's paleness or Lucifer's, if it was midnight or dawn!
Blackest Black Birthday
“She’s trying to paint me into a corner with her question mark army. She’s wanting to light my pants on fire. She seems super mad at me.“
A Remembrance of Aerial Forms
It was all a bullfight in the end—/The smell of death contends/With rain, and more blood than/We can measure or imagine is/Surrounded by spinning black/Umbrellas—
from To the Cold Heart
What if I said / I will never / talk to stone / brush grown to a golden / edge needs sing all night / who care?
Dead Birds and Other Poems
Sometimes, when the origin of ideas of the sublime and the beautiful / are struck by lightning, I root into the hail of stones / at the precise center of the world / and sink into that dust.
from “The Ones Who Listen”
To simply be a part of the changing afternoon light The old man I see / in my visions is composed of all the days / in between Your sense/awareness of who you are cannot be confined within / language You go up to Medicine Bow / and open the sky and step through
from Poems of the Drone Years
A selection from Bret Schneider’s poetry cycle, Poems of the Drone Years
from The Qualmist’s Quair
Better a handful / of calm than / two of clutching / at the wind….
The Rectifications & Ad Fontes
Two new poems by Joel Newberger, read at the Caesura issue 1 event.
Subandhu - Vāsavadattā
Then, early one morning, as the night was thinning out; as — like a ball of alms rice whitened with yogurt in the hand of the mendicant called Time; like a lump of foam on the dark river of the night sky; like a fragment of the celestial nymph Menakā’s white crystal nail file; dappled as beautifully as a honeycomb
Excerpts from Little Camels of the Sky
I am stupid, I am ungifted, I am awkward, but I pray to you, tall spruces. I am quite awkward, I am… a coward. Yesterday, I was frightened of a man I don't respect. It's because of my cowardice that I can't learn to ride a bicycle. I haven't enough will power for anything, but I pray to you, tall spruces.
Ioan Flora // Andreea Iulia Scridon & Adam J. Sorkin
“I decided early that poetry is made of exact details.” Ultimately, in his poetry, [Flora’s] details are raised far beyond prosaic, everyday specification, simple catalogues of what make up, to use the title of one of his early books, The Physical World (1977).
The Catskills Above the Catskills (Ptolemaic Visions)
I want to follow the paths of the stars, I tell myself. But this is not true. I want them to follow me. After all, the Earth is the center of the universe, and, as I am the center of the Earth, the universe revolves around me.
Franca Mancinelli // John Taylor
The act of writing, as Mancinelli conceives of it, takes her into her darkroom, a “place of the unknown, where [her] demons nestle [and her] most tenacious and impenetrable shadows [can be found].”
Claudia Masin // Robin Myers
Selections from Intact (2018) by Claudia Masin, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers.
June Journal
Today I begin in earnest. What does it matter that my thoughts are clouded? A light will shine through in the end.
Correspondence with James Berger
I loved Kent's ability to use the poetic art form to criticize not poetry itself, but the popular trends that muddy and obscure poetry by forcing all of us to dig through the garbage to find actual substance.
Discipline and Poetics: On Kent Johnson’s “From One Hundred Poems from the Chinese”
“From One Hundred Poems from the Chinese” doesn’t aspire to the brevity and concision of classical Chinese poetry. They’re relatively long, jumping between themes and styles, and always very funny.