From “The Back Chamber”
#AmericanWriters
Some days, when you read the newspaper, it seems clear that the United States is a country devoted to poetry. You can delude yourself reading the sports pages. After finding two referen...
A storm was coming, that was why it was dark. The wind was blowing the fronds of the palm trees off. They were maples. I looked out the window across the big lawn. The house was huge, f...
Twelve people, most of us stranger… in Ann Arbor, drinking Cribari fr… Then two young men, who cooked him… carry him to the table on a large square of plywood: his…
At the edge of the city the picker… vomits and dies. The river with its white hair staggers to th… My life lay crumpled like a smashe… Windows barred, ivy, square stone.
August, goldenrod blowing. We wal… into the graveyard, to find my grandfather’s grave. Ten years… I came here last, bringing marigolds from the round garden
Images leap with him from branch to branch. His eyes brighten, his head cocks, he pauses under a green bough, And when I see him I want to hide him somewhere. The other wood ...
Women with hats like the rear ends… applauded you, my poems. These are the women whose husbands… who close briefcases and ask, “Wha… I look in their eyes, I tell them…
In the mid August, in the second… of my First Polar Expedition, the… almost upon us, Kantiuk and I attempted to dash the sledge along Crispin Bay, searching agai…
It has happened suddenly, by surprise, in an arbor, or while drinking good coffee, after speaking, or before, that I dumbly inhabit
Mount Kearsarge shines with ice;… snow slides onto snow; no stream,… budges but remains still. Tonight we carry armloads of logs from woodshed to Glenwood and buil…
A woman who lived in a tree caught the moon in a kettle. The wind on the roof of the tree thumped
When the young husband picked up h… in the taxi one block from her tow… first lunch together, in a hotel d… with a room key in his pocket, midtown traffic gridlocked and was…
Pale gold of the walls, gold of the centers of daisies, yellow… pressing from a clear bowl. All da… we lay on the bed, my hand stroking the deep
The clock of my days winds down. The cat eats sparrows outside my w… Once, she brought me a small rabbi… which we devoured together, under the Empire Table
1. I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems. An ambitious project—but sensible, I think. And it seems to me that contemporary American ...