SPIRIT BLAST: Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me”
[SPIRIT BLAST is looking at poems through a bartender’s eye. —Ed] What’s this? Surprised by an ingredient you thought you …
Fresh Looks
Favorite Bookish Thing 2016: Lines by Hesiod
In a state of near-misery, I return to reading I did this summer: Dorothea Schmidt Wender’s ’73 translation of Hesiod …
Working through Ted Hughes’ “February 17th”
A lamb could not get born. Ice wind Out of a downpour dishclout sunrise. The mother Lay on the mudded …
FL: Spencer Reece’s “Gilgamesh,” or S. Reece Is a Mean Bastard & Heartsick
The grand weird gesture of the title “Gilgamesh” and the gentle cruelty of the first line—‘We lived on a lake with …
Thoughts on Roethke’s “Death Piece”
Invention sleeps within a skull No longer quick with light, The hive that hummed in every cell Is now …
FL: Lo Kwa Mei-en’s “How to Make Love to the Greenhouse”
Hers is a geode still hollowing a room for crystals. When someone tells me that ‘the heart is found a …
FL: Rae Armantrout’s “Win”
Card in the mail: “Win a free cremation.” • On the table top, a scatter, grains of salt (sugar?) …
FL: David Baker’s “Belong To”
In David Baker’s “Belong To,” the you and me of the ballad “You Belong to Me” (made famous by Patti …
FL: Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind”
I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done …
The Spider in Laura Riding
Elegy in a Spider’s Web What to say when the spider Say when the spider what When the spider the …
FL: Laura (Riding) Jackson’s “The Wind Suffers”
The wind suffers of blowing, The sea suffers of water, And fire suffers of burning, And I of a …
FL: Louise Glück’s “Telescope”
There is a moment after you move your eye away when you forget where you are because you’ve been …
FL: Timothy Donnelly’s “Monastic”
The ruined cathedral wept into my flesh because I held nothing within me with warmth enough to deflect it. …
FL: Mark Strand’s “Nostalgia”
The professors of English have taken their gowns to the laundry, have taken themselves to the fields. Dreams of …
FL: James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”
In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of …
FL: H.D.’s “Stars Wheel in Purple”
Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star as bright …
FL: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur”
As a reader, “God’s Grandeur” staggers me with its ‘bringing into being,’ immediately: first, an unflinching declarative, then the flame, then …
Reflecting on Glück
Since the 1968 birth of her inaugural collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück has been writing the poetry of modern myth. Ararat …
