Susannah M. Smith on Walter Benjamin
Peering into Walter Benjamin’s Archive I don’t know you, WB. I don’t know you at all. I’m thinking of the way people seem to hear about you serendipitously, repeatedly. I’m thinking of the leather suitcase that disappeared after you died, its contents alleged but never located: postcards, a manuscript, a pipe, morphine. You are gone...
Ken Babstock on Paul Muldoon
HOW POEMS WORK KEN BABSTOCK Hay By Paul Muldoon This much I know. Just as I’m about to make that right turn off Province Line Road I meet another beat-up Volvo carrying a load of hay. (More accurately, a bale of lucerne on the roof rack, a bale of lucerne or fescue...
Michael Redhill on Lisa Robertson
Click on poem to advance. Monday — From The Weather, New Star Books (2001) And poetry can also be sculpture, or at least more like sculpture than it’s like conversation. Lisa Robertson’s Monday , from her collection The Weather, is a poem that defies immediate analysis, although even the most perplexed reader will still be able to state a...
Lisa Robertson on Peter Culley
The Provisions BY PETER CULLEY Between the storms of October And the storms of March the deep, wide trench Of this afternoon, one of a series making up This temporal lapse, this interregnum In which we are involved. Ignorant as I am I hardly dare to speak of it, But the fabric of its projection...
Ken Babstock on Glyn Maxwell
PORTOBELLO by Glyn Maxwell When you were the one reading My palm, in the second hour of our one life, And I, sitting back for good and noticing white stuff Suddenly falling on Portobello and staying, You couldn’t for all the books in the world have learned More than one watching us, Who buttered his...
Ken Babstock on Helen Humphreys
Installation BY HELEN HUMPHREYS What we make doesn’t recover from us. Twisted scaffold, trellis of rust. This is how we will be gone. The steel hull grinning with rivets. Shiny notes of chrome swinging from the stave of the wrecker’s wall. Those we loved and nothing for that. The moon a chalk circle over dark...
Lisa Robertson on Dionne Brand
Dionne Brand In another place, not here, a woman might touch something between beauty and nowhere, back there and here, might pass hand over hand her own trembling life, but I have tried to imagine a sea not bleeding, a girl’s glance full as a verse, a woman growing old and never crying to a...
How Poems Work: Ken Babstock on David O’Meara
Field-Crossing by DAVID O’MEARA The clover’s razed; the ground is autumn-hard. The land bristles in a ragged frame. I’m on the far end, watching weightless clouds hastened by wind, the day dark but huge with a muscled rustling. A hydro pole impales the midriff of the field — a world-tree ripe with announcements; a pivot staking...
Ken Babstock on Les Murray
PIGS by Les Murray Us all on sore cement was we. Not warmed then with glares. Not glutting mush under that pole the lightning’s tied to. No farrow-shit in milk to make us randy. Us back in cool god-shit. We ate crisp. We nosed up good rank in the tunnelled bush. Us all fuckers then....
The Poneme: The Godlike Thought
When on occasion I teach poetry, one of the main things I try to instill in my students is, to quote Spicer, “Poet, be like God.” To go from trying to write poetry to really writing poetry, there’s a leap that has to happen, and that leap is a realization that you are the god...
Will Vallières on Rae Armantrout
Custom We maintain a critical distance from the sad spaniel gentlemen in cravats on the plaid duvet at the Custom Hotel, Los Angeles. We are so over it. We fly from terminal to terminal almost endlessly. We are almost money. We can wait at high speed. In the Rae Armantrout poem “Custom,” language is used...
Chris Hutchinson on Gabe Foreman
Kleptomaniacs As long as you keep an open mind about the thing you seek, it’s always in the first place you look. Gabe Foreman, A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People “The rich have kleptomania, while the poor are taken down with larceny.” Superintendent of a second-hand department store, New York, 1878 (Segrave...
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