This past Saturday, my review copy of Susan Elizabeth Howe‘s new book, Salt, arrived. I’ll be reviewing it for A Motley Vision and expect to have my essay completed and posted sometime in the next month or two, but in the meantime I wanted to post my initial response to the collection. While I haven’t yet read beyond the first… Read more »
Anthology Poet Highlight 39/82: Jim Richards, “Cleave” [audio: http://fireinthepasture.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/tumblr_lxc4b0b5581qldxkx.mp3] (My reading of “Cleave”) I take Jim’s “it” to be, yes, sex—but also more than sex. It take it to be the much deeper state of being, the more-than-intimate connection, the dual state of oneness entered into when partners become more than lovers, lovers more than partners. Such eroticism goes much… Read more »
In which I respond to and remix the first section of Michael Hicks’ poem, “Family Tree.” Scales hoarse as secrets whispered between lovers at dusk, a serpent—and not a serpent—licks at Adam’s dreams, tasting his flesh to test what knowledge had infused the first man in Father’s quickening sigh. Adam hears voices from deep in the serpent’s caress, hears a… Read more »
Poet Highlight: Emma Lou Thayne, “The Rose Jar“ Disturbing the dust on a bowl on rose leaves . . . –T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton“ In the opening section of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” the poet muses on the interconnections and “unredeemab[ility]” of time (line 5): “What might have been,” he says, “is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual… Read more »
Poet Highlight: Emily Stanfill, “Then I Became Eve“ What strikes me most about the poem, first, is the way the poet “verbs” the adjective innocent, using it not to describe her Eve—as in, “I am/was innocent/an innocent person”—but as a means of modifying her, as in, “He made me innocent.” This out-of-the-ordinary usage highlights, for me, the possibility of Adam… Read more »