Brooks Haxton
Everything so far had already happenedEverything else was about to happen. — Brooks Haxton, from “Canoe,” Mister Toebones: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021)
Month: August 2021
Richard Jackson
My own heart seems / locked away, the combinations lost, tomorrow lost / among the endless echoes of words not yet spoken. — Richard Jackson, from “The Invisible Object,” Retrievals (C & R Press, 2014)
Dante Di Stefano
You dab my wing with scarlet and set itinto flight each morning. You make a massof stretching and rising, a ceremonyfor greeting dawn in all its brute splendor.I love our life: the ordinariness,the routine, sprung, verging on, cardinal. — Dante Di Stefano, from “Reading William Carlos Williams in my Late Thirties” Paterson Literay Review (no.… Continue reading Dante Di Stefano
Philip Larkin
Spring has got into the wrong year. — Philip Larkin, from “How,” The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)
A.R. Ammons
I allow myself eddies of meaning:yield to a direction of significancerunninglike a stream through the geography of my work:you can findin my sayingsswerves of actionlike the inlet’s cutting edge:there are dunes of motion,organizations of grass, white sandy pathsor remembrancein the overall wandering of mirroring mind: but Overall is beyond me — A.R. Ammons, from “Corsons… Continue reading A.R. Ammons
A. Bartlett Giamatti
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on… Continue reading A. Bartlett Giamatti
Clementine von Radics
This is how we heal.I will kiss you like forgiveness. Youwill hold me like I’m hope. Our armswill bandage and we will press promisesbetween us like flowers in a book.I will write sonnets to the salt of sweaton your skin. I will write novels to the scaron your nose. I will write a dictionaryof all… Continue reading Clementine von Radics
Larry Levis
Each twilight like a blueprint in which something is always missing. — Larry Levis, from “Anonymous Source,” The Southern Review (vol. 51, no .2, Spring 2015)
Philip Larkin
And you are pieced together bit by bitSet against the eveningLovely and glowing, like a chain of gold. — Philip Larkin, from “(A Study in Light and Dark),” The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)
Kazuo Ishiguro
But then again I wonder if what we feel in our hearts today isn’t like these raindrops still falling on us from the soaked leaves above, even though the sky itself long stopped raining. I’m wondering if without our memories, there’s nothing for it but for our love to fade and die. — Kazuo Ishiguro,… Continue reading Kazuo Ishiguro
The Vale of Soul-Making 