Restless After School
By Debra Nystrom
Restless After School
By Debra Nystrom
Posted by Nin Andrews on May 16, 2025 at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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My book, Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poems, was just released from Etruscan Press. I am very excited. I am also enormously grateful to Etruscan Press, which is one of my all-time favorite presses. Not only do they publish many of my favorite authors including Tim Seibles, Dante di Stefano, Diane Raptosh, Claire Bateman, Colum McCann, but also, they are easy and enjoyable to work with. And the editorial assistance they offer is spot-on.
As thrilled as I am by this book making its way into the world, I am also filled with the familiar nauseating feeling of dread that I always experience when a book is published. The minute I hold a new book in my hand, I question everything I’ve written. No matter if I’ve receive a nice review, like this one, Southern Review of Books: Hidden Farm Life in “Son of a Bird”, or if I have enjoyed writing up an interview, Mackinaw Interview with Nin Andrews: Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poetry, or an essay, Eden Lost: Nin Andrews on the Pains and Rewards of Writing a Memoir About Her Father, I still feel overwhelmed with doubt.
I am especially doubtful now that I’ve waded into the genre of memoir. I find poetry much safer because it doesn’t claim to be the self in any literal way. How can any piece of writing really represent oneself? As Diane Raptosh puts it, “the self is a thousand localities.”
[The self is a thousand localities]
The self is a thousand localities
like a small nation—assembly required: borders and roads;
armies; farms; small and large pieces of parchment. I stand by
all the territories I have ever been, even as I can’t
remember them. I am a locum—ear to the emperor penguin, a banner ad
blinking to the hoi polloi. Since I’ve become John Doe, I swear
I can feel most objects with sixty digits
instead of five. This makes me think
of my wife. Makes me miss her left collar bone. Her hips’ wingtips.
A train moans from a far hummock.
Which reminds me that everyone I have to live without
I must help to find a place within. Which is an act
of granite will. A strain. A ditty.
An exercise in utmost beautility.
I often wonder: do other poets feel overwhelmed by doubt as I do? In this era of social media, it appears not. But then social media is an illusion, right?
I remember when my first book, The Book of Orgasms, was published by Asylum Arts. A large box of books arrived in the mail. I ripped open the box, picked up one book, read a poem, and then quickly put the book back, sealed the box back up, and carried it to the basement. I told no one about the book in my basement. Shortly after, the basement flooded. All the books had to be taken to the dump, along with the carpet and an array of boxes filled with childhood memorabilia. I was so relieved to get rid of those books. I thought, now that’s the end of that book.
This was back in 1996, before social media, before all the pressure was placed on writers to promote themselves. I miss those years! Somehow, in spite of myself, the book made its way into the world. I gave only one reading from the first edition of The Book of Orgasms, and it was to an audience of fifteen people.
So why, after all these years and many books, do I still feel so unsure of myself? I don’t know, but I think it might have something to do with the difference between writing and promoting your work. Or maybe it's just stage fright, as portrayed in this poem by Wislawa Szymborska.
For me, writing poetry is a private act. Writing poetry is like dancing alone in an unlit room to music only I can hear. Because no one is watching, I can transform into the prima ballerina. I am so graceful, the air becomes my friend—it lifts me up and up. I orbit the ceiling a few times then, fly out of the window and into the heavens and beyond before I come back again and land noiselessly on the page. I have so much fun, I think, this should be illegal. Then, someone turns on the light. I realize I am in a room with a one-way mirror, that everything I’ve done has been recorded. People can see in, but I can’t see out. It’s like a nightmare written by Sartre.
The dance metaphor I used (and I do think writing poetry is like practicing ballet) reminds me of this beautiful poem by David Tucker. And, in a very different way, of a surreal poem fragment by Peter Johnson, master prose poet, whose humor and gift keeps me afloat in times like these.
The Dancer by David Tucker
Class is over, the teacher
and the pianist gone,
but one dancer
in a pale blue
leotard stays
to practice alone without music,
turning grand jetes
through the haze of late afternoon.
Her eyes are focused
on the balancing point
no one else sees
as she spins in this quiet
made of mirrors and light—
a blue rose on a nail—
then stops and lifts
her arms in an oval pause
and leans out
a little more, a little more,
there, in slow motion
upon the air.
From Observations at the Edge of the Abyss by Peter Johnson
The dancing instructor who swears he is my brother. Who pretends to have read my translations of Catullus and walked my pug in a rainstorm that was so violent it forced the words “cyclone” and “bomb” to be used together. The guy who could argue about the length of Freud’s beard, and who once said, “What choices would you make if you lived your life hovering above the earth in a hot air balloon?” The dancing instructor who right now hands me a pair of shiny winged toe shoes and a coin guaranteed to grant me only half of what I might wish for.
Free download of Observations at the Edge of the Abyss is available here: “Observations from the Edge of the Abyss” by Peter Johnson (bepress.com)
Posted by Nin Andrews on May 05, 2025 at 01:20 PM in Announcements, Book Recommendations, Feature, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (6)
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Every now and then, I come across a quiet little poem that sticks in my head, like "Unrest" by Emily Fragos. Maybe because I worked at the local SPCA when I was a girl, or maybe because I lived on a farm where we received drive-by cats every spring, this poem speaks to me. It settles in the heart, just so.
Unrest
By Emily Fragos
Posted by Nin Andrews on April 18, 2025 at 01:45 PM in Feature, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (6)
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Posted by Nin Andrews on April 02, 2025 at 05:27 PM in Feature, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Every now and then, I come across a poet who makes my jaw drop, my heart skip a beat--my mind, too. A poet who surprises me line after line, poem after poem. They are like magicians who really do pull rabbits out of hats or make coins disappear or saw people in half. No matter how hard I try, I can't figure out how they do it. Amy Woolard is that kind of poet. Her debut book, Neck of the Woods, is a must-read, and I can't wait for her next collection. A former waitress and an accomplished Civil Rights lawyer, she probably doesn't have as much time to write as I would like her to. I find myself looking for her poems online whenever I need a hit of inspiration, a dose of awe, or that feeling, Oh wow, so that's what a poem can do.
Paper pusher, I’ll tell you what it feels like
To spend the exact cash you make the same
Night you make it. That sky velveted as
An empty ring box. Disintegration coming out
Of the speakers again. Neck-deep in the quarry swimming
Hole. This thing between us like snapping a bar of cold
Chocolate. I like wading into my weakness &
Treading there like the final girl. This life no
Bigger than a drugstore makeup aisle, than waking
Only to learn of the late-night car accident. Who said
To stitch shut is to mend. Each morning the dogs kept
Us alive, even when we hadn’t planned it. The room slow
Spun the way the water had moved around us, & the bare
Light on the water, those apparitions—our love’s
Strategy, a deer tendering into the kitchen through
A back door left open, through the rooms where we
Undressed. Bring me to myself & sew the horizon
Into place. Out of the winedark that sun we like
Was coming back into style. What we borrowed
We know we cannot return. I held your jaw
Like a piece of fruit. Your hand rested on the warm
Animal between us, running in its sleep.
Published in The New York Review
Late Shift
Those days I could only love someone who was ashamed
Of their teeth. The way the dogs will always sleep in the spots
They know I’ll need to step. The things we do so not to lose
Each other. So as to lose something every day. Church key,
Bar rag, the obscene puckered red of maraschino, the wrecked
Line cook in the walk-in. His chilled kiss. How it tastes like a future
Eviction. Thieves in the temple of our bodies. Years later I will
Still feel most at home when I eat standing up. When I settle up
In cash. When I barter for your attention. Fingernail of heat
Lightning tapping the tabled sky. A broken pint glass
In the ice bin. Every shift Sinéad sings This is the last day
Of our acquaintance. There are nights I give up on the world
But not my body. How in the Bruegel, if you didn’t know
The title you might not look for Icarus at all, a paper lantern
Giving its wish back to ground long after we’ve left. Push
A fork into a fish & what you get is a meal. Push a knife into
A knuckle & what you get is to be changed. Like Icarus, what I want
Is to start over but not do it all again. Like Icarus, I wanted the light
To love me back. How in my lungs still nests the fur of every animal I
Ever kept. Years later the gods will have me cough up a snow leopard.
I thought the main selling point of breathing was we didn’t have to
Be reminded to do it. I never wanted children but I always liked the one
About Athena pouring full-grown from Zeus’ forehead. How did we survive
Before Advil, love. Before the armor of us glinting in the closed kitchen
Dark. The way a creaky floorboard’s one job is to wait. Service means
The spoon appears before you know you need it. The water looks
To refill itself. The napkin calls a truce. When something is soft we believe
We deserve to touch it & so we do. When something is sharp we long to
Perfect it. Nothing belongs to us until last call: one more &
Then no more. The lights go on & it’s time to cough up
What’s owed. Build a cathedral in the dead of night & then give it
A shift meal, a smoking section, a cover charge, a swinging door, a till
To reckon. Those days we didn’t have a prayer, separated our love
From each other like cupping a yolk between the cracked half
Shells back & again until it’s perfect. Forgive ourselves. Give
Ourselves the tenderest title & call it a day. How could we ever
How could we not. Baby, draw the spoked sun in the corner
Of our afternoon sky. Wake us in its slow-cooked gaze.
Published online and in the print edition of the March 18, 2024, issue of The New Yorker
Posted by Nin Andrews on March 20, 2025 at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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I doubt I’m the only one who has been under the weather, under a cloud or a looming feeling of dread and doubt and disbelief. I’ve had a lingering cold for weeks that’s made my head feel twenty pounds heavier. This morning the doctor prescribed various medications for me, but I fear the cure is not in a medicine bottle.
In my logy state of mind, I’ve been dipping in and out of books and poems and podcasts, and I have come across a few uplifting discoveries.
First, Denise Duhamel's wonderful poem,"How It Will End," was featured on my favorite poetry podcast, Poetry Unbound last week. Everyone should listen to it. It's fabulous.
Second, I came across this wonderful gem of a poem from The New Yorker by the brilliant Virginia Konchan. She beautifully captures my hotel experience--meaning the ick of hotels-- while playing off of Hopkins "Pied Beauty." I am a huge fan of Konchan's poetry.
Glory be to god for septic tanks, drainage pipes:
for conversions thermodynamic and of the soul.
Glory be to god for this quiet, cheap hotel room:
only music the mini-fridge’s vibratory drone,
creaky plumbing groaning through the walls.
We underestimate the perfect peace of objects.
Before me was another traveller: after I leave,
hundreds of others will arrive, anonymously,
drink sink water from disposable plastic cups,
recline on bleached sheets, stare into the void
of a generic landscape painting across the bed
while contemplating the disaster of their lives.
And, when the alarm wails hours before dawn,
human cusses of angry protest join the chorus
of budget appliances failing before their time.
Why even look at a clock? It’s never good news.
It takes the time it takes, my estimated deadline,
which is likely why no employer would trust me.
I’m at an age where everyone around me is dying.
I’m at an age when the recited script isn’t enough.
Glory be to god for logjams, the antediluvian dark,
for being a supply of goodness outpacing demand
because so many prefer their egos’ endless ranting
to the suggestion of a different narrator or narrative.
Me, I am so clearly incapable of leading a brigade.
I’m glad to accept help in whatever form it comes:
hour of privacy within these semen-sprayed walls,
deadbolt securing my safety from the chaos outside
and the strivings of the people which are everywhere.
I can’t point to you on a map: don’t know your name
or from whence you came. But flames lick the canvas
and I acknowledge my poverty of being and my need.
Glory be to god for this unforgiving mirror, this soap,
this Gideon Bible tucked away in the bedside drawer:
whoever dwells in the secret place of the most High
will abide under the shadow of the Almighty, I read.
A freely given gift whose only precondition is belief,
it was put there for safekeeping, for salesmen like me.
And finally, I recently discovered a new and wonderful prose poet, Peter Krumbach, who makes me laugh. Like this poem from New World Writing:
Good morning, children. Don’t raise your hands yet. That’s right, I’m filling in for Mrs. Davis. Can I share a little secret with you? Yes? Well — I stayed up late last night. That’s right, very, very late. Why do you think I did? Take a guess. No… No… No… You give up? Okay. I was smoking, watching my wife bake a cake. And we both had a taste of what’s called a single molt Scotch. You know, my little hearts, there’s a thing Mrs. Davis probably hasn’t brought up to you yet. It’s called affection. Remember the word. It’s what the moon’s gravity does to the goo in our hearts. Like a tummy ache, but higher in the chest. Just ask your parents when you get home. And while you’re at it, ask them about disappointment, unease, addiction and the happiness of the dead. Now, if you promise not to tell anyone, we’re not going to read anything today. And we’re not going to write anything either. Can I hear you say Yeah? I can’t HEAR you! Say YEAH like you mean it! There you go! Okay, who’s hungry? Guess what’s in that box on my desk? It’s called Medusa’s head — my wife’s work of art. The eyes are maraschinos. The snake-hair is marzipan. Pass along those paper plates. And feel free to eat with your hands.
Posted by Nin Andrews on March 14, 2025 at 08:42 AM in Feature, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Tears in Sleep
All night the cocks crew, under a moon like day,
And I, in the cage of sleep, on a stranger's breast,
Shed tears, like a task not to be put away—-
In the false light, false grief in my happy bed,
A labor of tears, set against joy's undoing.
I would not wake at your word, I had tears to say.
I clung to the bars of the dream and they were said,
And pain's derisive hand had given me rest
From the night giving off flames, and the dark renewing.
― Louise Bogan
As I wrote yesterday, I feel as if we have just entered a new era, an era of tears, an era that defies belief in which one might want to cling to the bars of dreams. Or if not dreams, then poetry that can remind one that they have souls, a conscience, an ability to bear witness. Poems like those collected in Dustin Brookshire’s anthology, When I Was Straight, a Tribute to Maureen Seaton, a lovely celebration of both Maureen Seaton’s legacy and the LGBTQIA+ experience. And Maureen Seaton is truly a poet we all miss.
In his heartfelt introduction, Dustin Brookshire writes: “I fell in love with Maureen Seaton’s work when she read at Java Monkey Speaks in the fall of 2004. I was taking poetry classes as electives at Georgia State University, and Maureen was the first rockstar poet that I had met. I can still close my eyes and see Maureen on the Java Monkey stage and hear her reading her poem “Furious Cooking,” I sat in the audience in awe of Maureen. I’ve remained in awe of her since that day, and I’ll remain in awe of everything she accomplished and who she was until the day I die. If you also knew Maureen, then you’re nodding your head in agreement because you know exactly what I mean.” I do know. And I am nodding my head now.
This collection is not only brilliant, and necessary, it is also a gathering of exquisite poets/poetry. Like this one by Julie Marie Wade.
And this poem by Diamond Forde, which beautifully captures the adolescent experience.
When I Was Straight by Diamond Forde
The van mumbled in rush hour, a cemetery yawning gray teeth across the hillside to our right. “Hold your breath,” the birthday girl said, & all the five girls ‘cept me clap shut, hands smacking their happy mouths, matching bracelets nibbling red marks in their cheeks
& it wasn’t because I couldn’t afford a bracelet. & it wasn’t because this was my first sleepover (thought it was, twelve & never spent a night not home)
or that when I entered the birthday girl’s home I stumbled on the stairs that went forever, stiffened hallways, a white couch, a stand mixer, one lilac room, all hers—the birthday girl—who made us play celebrities, so I stilted into Ashanti (because her song carried me through all my imagined heartaches—the first, that none of you knew her name—)
and it wasn’t because there was a girl playing Justin who smelled like soap & smiled when she flicked bangs from her brunette eyes (I sighed, leaning my head into the basket of her thighs, when we claimed a minute, hoping my heartbeat didn’t clang its bell)
but because the birthday girl was Britney & each time their hands fluttered like dizzy birds to meet, I swallowed honey, spoke a quiet sweet enough to drown. What did I know about myself that wasn’t a key in the wrong lock? This desire, unaffordable—the dusty pocketbook of my heart clamped shut.
And this poem by Kelli Russell Agodon, which also takes one back to the life of a teen girl’s sexual awakening.
When I Was Straight by Kelli Russell Agodon
I thought everyone was easy
to love. The boys who brought me
bouquets of bluebells, the girls
braiding daisies into my hair at slumber
parties—the girls I couldn’t tell.
When I was straight, I was mostly curved,
a windy road of fading firs, a sunset
on a dead-end street holding the Indigo
Girls in one hand and Elvis Costello
in the other. Remember how I always wished
to be Tom Sawyer, maybe for the raft,
maybe to be closer to the perfect
Becky Thatcher. Looking back, it’s easy
to understand how I was in enchanted
with every pathway, how each exit was also
a possibility. Everyone is easy to love, I told him,
I told her, I told them—a garland of forget
-me-knots blooming around my waist.
And I can’t resist posting one more on the same theme.
When I Was Straight by Alison Blevins
When I was straight, my body was detached. My face, a portrait in every mirror, changed each night, some new arrangement of drip and swirl, watercolor hair, my lips thin pastel rose then absurdly large and quirked at each corner. My body now still resists recognition, insists on new arrangements of color and sound. But when I was straight, my eyes sand most mornings, sang a language of green and gold—something felt promised to me then, at 13, at 15, so young, fresh mourning in my mouth and breath, even behind closed doors, even afraid, even flat and still in my best friend’s bed, our fingertips only just so, our hips pulling and pulling. Silent in her bed, her fingers touched my arm—gentle as blue and sweet corn and pond water lapping. Nothing would ever be the same after—that pain promised—how want burned, want wetted our lips and teeth. In Japan, they have a word for when your mouth is lonely. Pain promised to never let go at 16 in her bed, on our backs, barely touching skin. When I was straight, I hoped that pain might last forever.
Posted by Nin Andrews on February 14, 2025 at 12:22 PM in Feature, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (0)
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“At midnight tears
Run into your ears.”
― Louise Bogan
I feel as if we have just entered a new era, an era of midnight tears, an era that defies belief and sleep. Maybe that’s why I keep looking backwards instead of forward, reading books that pay tribute to times and loved ones who have passed, books like Denise Duhamel’s Pink Lady. Gary Young’s American Analects, Beth Gylis’s After My Father, Dustin Brookshire’s anthology, When I Was Straight, a Tribute to Maureen Seaton, which I will discuss tomorrow.
Last night I read Pink Lady, Denise Duhamel’s heart-wrenching book about her mother’s last year and found myself weeping unconsolably. And when I fell asleep, I dreamt I was talking to my own mother who was seated in her favorite flowered chair, looking like her younger self, but then I realized she wasn’t there. Is this a common dream of loved ones who have passed?
In the dream I keep losing my mother—
the nursing home hallways are crowded,
and when I look at the wheelchair I’m pushing,
it’s empty. I turn around and press through,
afraid she’s slipped out. I go to the main desk
where an orderly tells me he thinks
he saw her in Room 104, so I hurry there
to find my mother, young again,
sitting upright, biting into a pear.
When I wake, I go to my dream dictionary—
eating the pear indicates success.
But nothing about the significance of 104.
A quick Google search brings me
to an “Angel Number” site, which tells me”
Your angel is close to you now,
looking for ways she can assist.
I’ve always been a fan of Gary Young’s prose poetry. His short untitled poems can frame a moment or capture an insight in a way that lingers in the mind for days. In his most recent collection, American Analects, Young magically weaves together poems about his friends and family, the Japanese painter Buson, and his mentor, the painter, Gene Holton to create a meditation on art, aging, and loss. I was particularly taken with the poems about Gene Holton.
Gene said, a love affair in old age is what the world is all about. Everything is more expanded—you find yourself surprised to have feeling that you didn’t have the day before, and you discover new ones every day. He said, when Elizabeth died, the vacancy was overwhelming; I couldn’t recognize the world. Things are very still here, he said. The stillness of impossibility is one thing, but this stillness is everywhere. He said, lately there’s been a change: Elizabeth is becoming a reference point rather than a reality, and her absence is oppressive, unbearable. I have her pans, her hat, but I want Elizabeth back.
Gene kept painting after Elizabeth died, but said, I've lost my audience. He said, at least I haven't lost interest in the conversation with the work, but there's no reason for doing it, and who's doing it is unknown to me.
Then I want to mention Beth Gylys’s chapbook, After My Father, a Book of Odes. Glyys, who is known for her mastery of the villanelle, is almost a mistress of the ode. I especially love her “Ode to My Father’s Manhattans.”
Ode to My Father’s Manhattans by Beth Gylys
Clink
of ice
in a glass,
crack
of the cubes
as he poured,
bright red
eye
of a maraschino
bobbing
in the brown
gold
slosh
of Jim Beam
and sweet
vermouth.
Surely
we could
swim
in a lifetime,
of those drinks,
gallons
upon gallons
swirled, sipped,
swilled
and swallowed,
sticky
on the counter,
the twinkle
of his high.
My father’s
Manhattans
sometimes
made him
want to dance,
to tell
the latest joke.
My shy father
lit
from within
becoming
someone
other
than himself,
sloppy-jolly,
sometimes
standing
(or that
is how
I remember it—
him at the table
standing,
hands
moving
like an Italian
from my mother’s
side of the family),
my father
and the glass
empty
but for
soft stones
of melting ice,
my father
abuzz,
chatty,
full of stories—
then
my father,
spent,
his chin
on his chest.
Posted by Nin Andrews on February 13, 2025 at 01:16 PM in Feature, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Anyone reading my recent posts might notice I've been talking/thinking a lot about David Keplinger's poetry. These last few weeks, his poems have been speaking to me. I see in his prose poems the influence of French surrealists and prose poets I adore, as well as the mystics I studied in college. Also, as someone who grew up on a farm, I love how he writes/thinks about animals. And as a lousy Buddhist, I am a huge fan of his guided poetry meditations. His poems have opened a little doorway in my mind I had forgotten existed. So, I thought I would interview him. I have so many questions to ask him, questions about his prose poetry, his thought process, you name it.
NA: First, I want to post your poem, “Angels and Wounds.”
Angels and Wounds
A play called Angels and Wounds, by David Keplinger, that goes on for years and has no curtain, where the author plays one of the parts. In some scenes it is the wound in him that sees the wound in the other. What is re-enacted is an old disaster. In some scenes it is his Angel that addresses the other’s wound, or it is reversed, and he is the wounded one, drawn to the Angel. Codependence casts its green light on the stage. There is hardly any dialogue except the sound of silverware, bottlecaps, slamming doors. But in some scenes the Angel in him engages the Angel in the other. It’s the same play his parents put on, and he plagiarized everything.
I wanted to start with this poem because I think it is a great example of what I love about your work. It’s witty, a little dark—maybe a little self-mocking. And it’s also serious and universal. I had this silly thought after reading it—I thought I was the only one who keeps re-enacting an old disaster. And then, of course, the last line is perfect. But after reading about your parents, I started wondering about your history.
Could you say a few words about your mother and father: how they influenced you/your work? I guess I’m looking for an origin story. Where did the great poet, David Keplinger, come from?
DK: My parents were two very different people who learned, over the fifty years they spent together, how to recalibrate their often rocky relationship with humor. They were each very funny, but together they were the funniest one person I have ever known. I think my interest in the prose poem happened because I was so immersed in jokes in childhood. In my thirties I read Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, in which he takes many great jokes and just obliterates them by explaining them. I saw the relationship between the leaps required in the poem and the deeply familiar and completely surprising landing of a good joke. I saw how, when you were listening to a joke, the punch line was somewhere incubating in every line. You know it’s coming. You’re laughing already. But how do you know? When the punch line was approaching, I learned to anticipate, I reveled in the being fooled, I hoped that I wouldn’t be able to guess what would happen. When the punch line landed it was nothing like what I expected and at the same time could have been nothing else. I saw that jokes and poems—my kind of poems, that is—exist in the gaps between the broken parts of life. Poems pay attention to the broken parts because that’s in fact the life we’re living in the everyday. I like to say, “every metaphor begins in dissonance and ends in unity.” It would only be through brokenness that we get to what is real…only through the everyday that we could reach the eternal, the way Dante has to pass through the Inferno on his way to Paradiso.
“Angels and Wounds” was a poem I wrote a bit differently than the others here. Most of the poems in The World to Come revealed themselves to me slowly; they opened up before me and my job was just to carefully tear away the wrapping paper. But this poem began with an idea I’ve always had about my parents. Wound-wound relationships, which are so painful, because they feed on mutual resentment. Or angel-wound relationships which are co-dependent. And angel-angel relationships in which both parties are participating in the union as if they are one thing, doing the work for the work itself. I observed all of that in my parents. When they were funny, they were letting go so beautifully, they were becoming, as I said, one thing. When they were funny there was so much love. Even recognizing this, I can’t help acknowledging that I have plagiarized all those behaviors from my parents’ play.
NA: I remember you saying your father loved broken things, and later, I heard you say that grief is something you try to welcome and not push away. In other words, you embrace brokenness. You do this as a poet and as a Buddhist practice? Is that how your book, Ice, came about? It seems to me that the collection has many layers of grief, of melting.
DK: Yes, you’re right about that. It’s not that brokenness is more important than wholeness. It’s that brokenness is the way things appear and wholeness is how they actually are. To use the plural is even misleading, because things “aren’t.” Everything is. The original title for Ice was Is. I decided it would have been too hard to conduct a search for it. Ice, in my book, is is-ness in its blocked state. Congealed state. It begins with frozen bodies of Pleistocene wolves and puppies and woolly rhinos and cave lions recently discovered in the melting permafrost in Yakutia, a region in Siberia. There was one case where a nematode, a microscopic flatworm dating back to the last Ice Age 40,000 years ago, was thawed and brought to life and then reproduced in a lab. An animal that lived while Neanderthals were being slowly exterminated by Homo Sapiens. It lived in a not-alive, not-dead state all that time. These stories of animal bodies struck a deep chord in me. I began to think about the other bodies in me, the bodies of my infant self, my childhood self, my teenager self, and so on. I began to think about the ways they can be activated and rise to the present moment, not knowing that the world around them has changed. This is the trauma response. We think we’re still in the Pleistocene of our childhood, and so we react that way when someone pushes a button. Suddenly out of the ice comes this toddler.
But the ice never really melts. Down they go again when the situation resolves. They might stay there forever. For me, what melted the ice was literature, poetry. It was a light that brought these parts of myself out of those chthonic realms and in the open air. Poetry melted everything. It helped release my embarrassment and anger and pain and resistance and to let much of that go. This is what I must have meant by welcoming grief, looking longer into grief, rather than looking away. Welcoming brokenness, looking longer into brokenness, rather than looking away. Because I begin to see that grief is just frozen love, love that is stuck and unable to be released. Until it is.
NA: I want to talk about another poem or rather, other poems, starting with this one:
Gazebo
On the subject of tenderness, let us sit and discuss for an hour under the imaginary gazebo of meaning. It is like a moment in Pietro Lorenzetti, where what Jesus teaches at the table, the little cat and dog lapping up the extra bread, already know how to do.
As someone who grew up on a farm, I love how you write about animals. You seem to see the animals as teachers. You honor their lives. I really admire your poem, “Reading Gilgamesh Before Going to Sleep,” in which you mourn the loss of your dog, Molly. There’s that the line I keep repeating to myself: “and when I had the chance to live I was distracted anyway—”
I wondered if you could talk a little about this.
DK: You connected the animals in Ice to my general awe of animals, which began for me with Whitman:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
(“Song of Myself,” 32)
And then there were Rilke’s poems about animals like the panther and the insect and the black cat and the flamingos, and of course Mary Oliver’s depiction of the natural world, dogs and bears and foxes, which I came to love in my years of friendship with her and in my admiration of her genius.
The poem “Gazebo” is a little offering about the 14th century Italian master Pietro Lorenzetti. He knew that to make Christ real, right on the seam between the transcendent and the everyday world, he had to create a scene that considered the ordinary people who looked on while the Last Supper took place. It’s a historical rendering of the event. But on the right side of the fresco, it’s all spooky and supernatural. There’s just stars, infinity, space, mystery. On the left side are these two waiters listening through the doorway as they wash dishes, and a little dog laps up food from God’s dinnerplate. And this Christ figure sits right in the middle, the interpreter between the human and the cosmic. It’s incredibly modern. It’s the birth of modernity, I believe. By the 16th century, Breughel has advanced the idea so far that the ploughman practically takes up the whole picture, while the god, now, is little Icarus with his two tiny legs splashing in the waters of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. I can never get away from this lesson on the complementarity of the eternal and time. In my poems, the animals are more like Jesus in Lorenzetti; they’re interpreters from a realm before language and history. That’s why I associate them with childhood. But you’re right when you say that the animals are my teachers.
In the Gilgamesh poem you ask about, I conflate the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu (an arrogant king and the wild person come from the woods, each teaching the other compassion and civility, respectively) with my relationship to Molly, a pit mix who was my best friend and who traveled to many places with me over the eleven years I got to be her person. Circumstances had it that I wasn’t present when she died. I went into deep mourning, because I had let her down. There’s a line in that poem where I write, “when she left I walked through oceans of myself/ like Gilgamesh searching for a way to stay in pain forever/ because I didn’t know how else to honor what had died for me.” Now and then, forces flow into our lives which we don’t deserve. The animals visit us in this way. I hope my poetry notices these visitations of grace.
This is very hard to talk about. I see myself as a poet who has to use the words to scoop under the words. The animals are like these Virgil figures who take you there. Now, not to say that animals don’t speak languages of their own—they do—but in the quiet communication between yourself and a great being like a horse or an elephant or a whale or a dog or a cat, you have to dig to a place where sheer, intelligent nature—not words—is the means of contact. They sweep you down into their realm very quickly.
NA: I’ve only been posting your prose poems here for a reason—I want to hear you talk about the form. You described how you compose prose poems in an interview with Grace Cavalieri– I think you said that first there appeared to you the shape—in the case of prose poems, the shape was a box, then all you had to was fill the box with words. I am picturing a toybox. Can you elaborate?
DK: Ah, it’s such a great topic and a lovely question. I started writing prose poems after working with Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen on his selected poems, which we published in 2007. Carsten names Simic’s The World Doesn’t End as a heavy influence. Me too. We already had a lot in common. We saw the French Symbolism in Simic, not surrealism, but something earlier that reflects the work of Max Jacob or Rimbaud. Once I crawled around in the attic of Carsten’s imagination, I was changed forever. My poetry had a stoop. I’ve written three books of prose poems, the earliest being The Prayers of Others (2006), followed by The Most Natural Thing (2013) and then The World to Come (2021). In all my books, though, there are prose poems. I love the form.
But is it a form? It’s a box, yes. Better to say, I have stripped away all formality here, all ostentation you connect with poetry. I have even stripped away beginnings and endings. Carsten used to say a prose poem “begins in the middle and ends in the middle.” I’m even going to, in some cases, strip away the title. It’s just a window in a tenement, like the gray windows of Edward Hoppers’ paintings. Shadow figures, people sitting on the edges of their beds, reading letters, caught in the middle of the act. A prose poem is shaped like and is experienced like a photograph, a cacophony of images contained in the box of the form. I love how you compare it to a toybox. The toys have no relationship between them, other than that they are contained in this box. And the whole box, all the separate parts in inter-relationship, speaks of the child to whom it belongs. Such a metaphor for the psyche or the world. Mallarme said that things alone don’t carry symbolic meaning, but that meaning is only to be found in the interstice between images. Prose poetry emphasizes this for me. It is an escape from logic, from order, from reason. It is negative capability. It is a disappearing cabinet. It says: don’t look for answers here, but an experience. And that is just how it gets you. It haunts you. It sucks you in.
I have this totally unprovable theory that prose poetry begins with Shakespeare. In Hamlet, Claudius and Gertrude speak in heroic couplets and the rest of the members of the court most often speak officially in verse. Yet when the gravediggers speak, it’s in paragraphs. They tell jokes. They are standing on the margins of the court and yet they know more about what’s going on within than the insiders do. They are free from formality. They’re glum but also joyful. They dig graves, but they are also very light. They are the agents of removal and release. The gravediggers are the voices of the prose poets.
NA: What do you think of Russell Edson’s view that prose poems should be funny?
DK: There’s a teasing smile behind the words. Look at Simic and Edson and Tate, all of them. Somehow, the words are smiling.
NA: Do you have ideas about the shape of a book before you write it?
DK: I usually have no idea what the book will be. Mary Oliver told me after my first book was published that the real work was ahead of me. She said the second book is much harder to write than the first book. In my case, she was right. It took me six years. What happens for me is that the book will take as long as it’s going to take. I wrote the next one (The Prayers of Others) in six weeks. And then the fourth one took me seven years. I have a friend, an artist named Jim Youngerman, who draws by making shapes on the paper until they begin to look like something. Then he draws in the direction of whatever that seems to be. Then, he’ll get into a series using those shapes in different ways. This is very similar to the way I work. Once I know what the book is trying to do (the ice metaphor and the Pleistocene animals, for example), the poems come very quickly. But it might require years of writing before I hit upon the notion or the metaphor that feels sturdy enough to build the book upon.
NA: Reading your books, I wondered if you were a Religious Studies major in college? I recognize so many references from my years of religion and philosophy classes.
DK: What a compliment to hear this. No, I was a poet from the start. I had one philosophy course in college, and I wasn’t interested in those writers until well after, until I started to perceive them as fuel for some fire that was cooking in me. I was twenty-five or twenty-six before I became a very serious reader. I don’t know what happened. As CK Williams said somewhere, I was a writer first, and the reading came after. But when it did, it lit up parts of me I hadn’t known were there. When I was twenty-six, I read Dante for the first time. When I was twenty-seven, in 1995, I left to teach abroad for two years in the city of Frydek-Mistek near the Czech/Polish border. There were only a few English books in our school library and I just ate them up. There was nothing else to read, no phones, no devices, not much television (I learned Czech but not well enough). The nearest internet cafe was forty-five minutes away. I checked email for an hour once per week. There was a movie theater that played Czech films. I loved seeing American musicals on TV because at least they wouldn’t dub over the songs. This was my education. I listened to stories in my broken Czech, old drinkers who told me about their trouble with the communists. I met survivors of the Holocaust in quiet nineteenth century looking parlor rooms. I played music, taught my classes, wrote poems in bars called Café Goethe and The White Raven. I wrote letters by hand. I read books. It was my school. The tuition was silence. My teachers were everywhere.
NA: So many of your poems make me laugh. Like “Politeness,” which made me wonder if you ever came to dinner at our house. I have four sisters, and when their suitors dined with us, it was just like this poem.
Politeness
I said very little during the meal. She and her father sat watching me. I remember the hard work of politeness, how it is done out of, not love, but surrender. How I sawed and sawed at the meat. How the deer did not flinch on the plate.
DK: Yes, this is the smile behind the words I was speaking about. And it’s an example, too, of how the work reveals itself to me. “Politeness” began several years ago as a poem about ghosts. Now there are no ghosts in it, but only this suitor and the poor deer, both coerced into surrender.
NA: Then there are your translations—I have been reading your translations of the poet, Carsten René Nielsen. Could you tell me how these translations came about?
Hammershøi
It’s been described to me: the way the light changes in the window in the background. But no matter how I concentrate, and as if by a will of its own, my focus is drawn into the picture, moving along the wainscoting, above the gray walls, toward the book on the table, the cut of the chair-back, then resting always for a moment on the luminous nape of the woman in the black dress, who sits turned away and with her head bowed. Exactly at this moment, either the sunlight suddenly changes quality, or someone’s shadow hastens past the window in the background. You hardly notice it, and when you look, it’s already gone.
from House Inspections, translated by David Keplinger
DK: This, too, came about during those years I lived in the Czech Republic in the mid-1990s. I was visiting Copenhagen when a friend pulled from his bookshelf the new book of a young and up-and-coming poet. Right there on the spot he translated a poem for me. I was so taken with it, I wrote Carsten via his website, asking if I could see more. He told me there were no poems in English, but would I like to try my hand at translating some? So that is what we did. It took us three years to figure out what we were doing. But when I finally started sending his poems to journals, there was an immediate interest. So we kept going. That was almost thirty years ago. A new book, our fifth, called Miniatures, is set to appear later this year from Plamen Press.
NA: Finally, I wanted to ask about your Buddhist practice. What kind of Buddhism? Why Buddhism? How does practice influence your work? And then you lead guided meditations featuring poems?
DK: I grew up Catholic within my mother’s large Sicilian family. Sometime late in graduate school, I began to become interested (though I don’t know why or how this happened) in Christian mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Father Thomas Keating, Centering Prayer. It’s what led me, finally, to Dante. Then, Buddhism naturally emerged out of that interest in contemplative practices. I’ve been engaged in Buddhism since the early 2000s. I began to see, even back then, that the language I was using for where poems come from had its corresponding glossary in Buddhism. After being a sometimes student of Mahayana, specifically Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, I enrolled in Tara Brach’s and Jack Kornfield’s Mindfulness certification program in late 2020. That introduced me to Theravada Buddhism which bases its practice on the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha. After studying in the program for two years, I founded The Mindfulness Initiative at AU (MIAU), where every Friday in the semester, we sit with a poem for a half an hour. The poets aren’t Buddhists, necessarily. I’ve done sessions on Mary Oliver, Hopkins, Dickinson, Whitman, Rumi, and many contemporary poets, including our beloved Myra Sklarew, who passed away last month. I open with a guided meditation in the style of Tara Brach, speak a little dharma talk for about ten minutes on the poem, and then we return to the meditation with a question or a theme gleaned from the writing. Since 2022, the audience has grown. It’s expanded beyond AU. So I have begun to acknowledge that there’s a need for this little marriage of the literary and the luminous. Each week we have anywhere from thirty to fifty people join our group on Zoom. If anyone is interested in visiting or just getting onto the mailing list (where I send each week a link to the recording of the previous session, along with an essay in response to the theme), they can fill out the contact form at: http://eepurl.com/ilpwh9.
Videos archive over fifty of our meetings here: https://www.youtube.com/@davidkeplinger3236/videos
Sample poems, reviews, and news:
Posted by Nin Andrews on January 22, 2025 at 11:41 AM in Feature, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (3)
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I keep thinking about the LA fires. Today is the first day I woke up and didn't see the fires at the top of my newsfeed. I hope that's a good sign. I've been thinking of all the LA poets I admire, hoping they are safe. I thought I'd post a poem by LA poet, Rick Bursky, in honor of these nightmarish times.
Here We Go Again
by Rick BurskyIt’s hot. The empty sky begins to melt.
In the shade of a tree, a peregrine falcon
Is eyed nervously by a pigeon.
An old barber chuckles to himself as he searches
The backroom for bloody rags
And someone’s mother sweeps up the broken mirror.
When the sun sets, all hell will break loose.
After all, this is the end of world,
The credits are about to scroll on the clouds.
Whoever is left will have to start over —
A new pocket protector for their shirt,
A hunting rifle useless until gunpowder is invented again.
Posted by Nin Andrews on January 17, 2025 at 12:23 PM in Feature, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (3)
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It was on this day a few years ago that my son had major GI surgery. A wet snowstorm had glazed the roads with ice, and Covid was raging across the state. No visitors were permitted in medical facilities, but I had been granted special permission. After all, my son had almost died in the same hospital the summer before when a medical team failed to take his situation seriously. (A nurse had insisted for four days that his pain meant nothing—then his insides burst.) Needless to say, I pulled every string I could find in order to be there.
The surgery was successful. It marked the end of our time in Purgatory.
For two years we had lived in and out of hospitals, in and out of hope and despair, in and out of that place where time slows and sometimes pauses, where the souls of the almost-dead and almost-born share elevator rides, where dread and relief walk hand-in-hand, where there are no hours, no weeks or weekends, no months, and certainly no holidays, where every door is guarded, where every window displays a view of another hospital wing, where once we watched a patient life-flighted in, where angels airlifted others out.
I still dream I am in the hospital beside my son who is lying in a bed, tubes up his nose and throat, monitors beeping and humming, nurses and doctors entering and exiting . . . Oh, how he wished for sleep back then. Real sleep, not the drugged-induced brand. I wished I could give it to him--which now makes me think of this untitled poem by David Keplinger:
I made this paper boat for her, who finds it difficult to sleep. She imagines she is floating on its little stern, here, under her sleeping mask, under the covers. All you’ll need is one plain sheet. It’s folded like the beak of a bird. With your fingers, pry the wide beak open. You are opening the beak. You are climbing inside.
The world is so strange when you come back from Purgatory. (Sometimes I wonder if I ever fully returned.) Nothing makes sense: the news, social media, everyday conversations. My mind was a blur. I couldn’t write. Or rather I couldn’t write coherently. The humorous poet I was had disappeared. Not only that, I couldn’t stand her poetry. Slowly I began to write my forthcoming book, Son of Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poems. When I read it now, I feel the presence of Purgatory, the mix of memory and dreams. And sadness, a salty, bitter aftertaste.
Sometimes, I look for books or poems that describe that feeling/space I lived in for those years. Murakami comes the closest. I keep reading his work, underlying whole paragraphs. There is also this poem by a Danish poet, Carsten René Nielsen, that describes the hunger I feel when reading, expecting or hoping to find something in particular. And the overwhelm I experience when I succeed.
Book
by Carsten René Nielsen, from House Inspections, translated by David Keplinger
I always rely on reason when I select works one can only understand with one’s feelings, but one day at the antiquarian bookshop I found myself in each and every book I opened. As always, I was only on the lookout for a word or two, those which seem to glow from below the horizon, but what a drama it’s become instead. Now the letters are towering around me, and at any moment the catastrophe can happen: that someone with a moistened finger will turn the page.
And there is this poem by Laurie Clements Lambeth, which describes the nether-world one enters when diagnosed with a chronic illness.
Cusped Prognosis
Time declines all, they say. Progression inevitable, they say. Hills that rise slant down. You have the floor, they say. How far down, I say. They say how low can you go. How steep a slope, I say. Slight drop, they say. Plateau. Slump, not flatline, they say. You understand, these were words before: up, down, I say, words I do not own but feel I should. Downward, they say, is normal, but plateau is where we’ll put you. Stay flexible. Incline toward this wind. Go ahead and zanaflex, they say. Progress, the way of the future, they say. We are inclined to say it’s relatively stable. Mesa, not mountain, they say. The fall-off hills rise in masses, flat on top. White clouds bite down on them like teeth, I recall, chomping. What’s the grade of incline, I say. They say mild decline. They say they feel inclined to know. Come down here, I say. Take a tumble. Slide. Incline your ear. They decline my invitation. Making progress, they say. An upgrade. Very busy. Your health has reached its quota and is no longer available, they say. Have I been downgraded, essentially going downhill, I say. A positive result yields a negative outcome, they say. They decline to know for sure. Testing negative, they say, has a positive outcome. A decline in contrast sensitivity, I say. They say slow descent, the good kind. A little tip. Lucky dip. I assent and say all’s downhill from here. I say downhill into the flood. Dive, I say, not cannonball. Controlled fall. I am inclined to take a dip, I say, from time to time, but always rise to the surface. Dip down, they say. Tip forward. Don’t let us (drop now) push you, they say, a nudge. I say it is our policy to decline tips, a pleasure to — Arching off the incline, I incline to a different wind.
Posted by Nin Andrews on January 07, 2025 at 04:46 PM in Feature, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (1)
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I hate Christmas. Every December, the seasonal blues hit as soon as Thanksgiving ends. I wish I could fall asleep on the last weekend in November and wake up on January 2. A friend of mine, who is in AA, suggested that I should try faking it until I make it. So, I have been dressing in a red sweater and green leggings and wearing a little red cap. I look like an aging Christmas elf. (I despise Xmas outfits, so I am going all-out.) I even have a holly berry pin in my white hair and a blinky tree brooch on my sweater. If anyone looks at me funny, I smile and say, 'Tis the season. And if they ask how I am, I say, “Jolly, very jolly, thank you so much. Are you jolly, too?”
Well, are you?
Right now, how could I (or anyone) not be jolly when listening to Maria Carey sing “All I Want for Christmas." Or Bobby Helms sing “Jingle Bell Rock” or Andy Williams croon “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” Or Michael Bublé, “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas.” Who can resist singing along with them?
And by golly I do feel almost jolly imagining a world in which I am someone else, someone who loves all the music and manic shopping and traffic and decorating and cooking and office-partying and fruit cakes and eggnog (I think fruit cake and eggnog should be outlawed) . . . If I were someone else, I might even write poems about this other life/world in which I can become someone else.
Which is exactly what Denise Duhamel does in her hilarious and brilliant new chapbook, In Which. Reading her poems, I feel less like a grinch and more like I am in the company of a kindred spirit. Oh, Denise, I think to myself as I read, your poems are a gift to the world.
POEM IN WHICH I PURSUED MY DREAM OF DOING STAND-UP
by Denise Duhamel
—from In Which
2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner
Posted by Nin Andrews on December 20, 2024 at 02:12 PM in Book Recommendations, Denise Duhamel, Feature, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (5)
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Drive-by animals, we called them when I was a girl—the dogs and cats dumped off on our farm by passing cars. The cats took up residence in the barns. One year our farm had over fifty barn cats. The number changed all the time—a lot of strays didn’t survive. They crouched in the alfalfa field when the mower swept by. Or they caught distemper or were killed by the dogs.
The animal-dumping practice is ongoing. I currently live on a dirt road in Virginia, and just this fall, my neighbors and I have adopted three black roosters, two barn cats, and a puppy, all left on the road. The chickens were hard to catch, but several of my neighbors were well-versed in the art of rooster-catching. “Dive for their feet or tail feathers!” they yelled as they grabbed for their claws and landed in the tall grass. Turns out a rooster can turn into a rocket and fly straight up in the air, thus avoiding capture. The cats didn’t need help finding shelter—they simply moved in to the closet barns. The puppy, a six-pound poodle-mix, flung from a BMW on a freezing Saturday afternoon (a hunter witnessed the event) was clueless. Looking bewildered, she shivered in the middle of the road. The puppy has now taken over our home.
What causes people to see the countryside as a dump? It’s not just unwanted animals you can find here. Old mattresses, toilets, air conditioners, and sofas land in the creeks, fields, and woods. There’s a rusted-out school bus deep in one of the valleys. An armchair used to sit on a hillside, as if someone dragged it there to watch the sunrise. One summer day I thought of sitting on it before bees and mice came buzzing and squealing out of it, and a rat snake slid across my path, pursuing its next meal.
I’m not one to be overly romantic, but I am a fan of poets like William Wordsworth, Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, Sydney Lea, John Lane and Nickole Brown, among others, who celebrate the natural world. I recently enjoyed this essay on Robert Frost by Sydney Lea. The poem, “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry speaks of how I find solace in times like this.
The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
That said, I’m not one to find the natural world a purely peaceful place, not when I lie awake at night, listening to the coyotes howl and hope they aren't dining on a newborn calf. Crossing the fields this morning with the pup, I watched buzzards circle overhead before I came across the carcass of a fawn. And then there are the horrors of farm life. Whenever a cow becomes sick or injured or otherwise undesirable (like the little bull who jumped every fence), for example, the farmer who owns the herd sends them to the feedlot or the slaughterhouse. I am reminded of this poem by David Keplinger.
The Head Gate Injury
by David Keplinger
The head gate didn’t tear the shoulder from the neck, it tore the neck from the shoulder, and the neck was displaced in a far-flung angle. They carried him toward the feedlot. And all the way he was quiet. He held his hand against the neck. He did it to keep it from falling off the world, which is to say, he did it to keep it from falling off his body. To the feedlot he floated as toward a drawbridge. I’ll pay for the gate, he managed at last. In careful English. I’ll pay for everything I did and I am very sorry.
Posted by Nin Andrews on December 12, 2024 at 02:02 PM in Feature, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (5)
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NA: I thought of you, Grace, when I attended an interview with Amore Towles, conducted by Jim Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia. The interview was such a disappointment. Ryan’s questions were so generic and uninspired, I wondered if he had even read Towles’ work. I kept thinking, if only Terry Gross or Grace Cavalieri were doing the interview. You are the Terry Gross of poetry.
Afterwards, I began to think about what goes into a good interview. How much research do you do for your interviews?
GC: I read everything the U.S. POET LAUREATES have ever written before interviews, and for other poets, I know their latest book(s) thoroughly.
NA: It’s remarkable, this skill you have as an interviewer. What is the secret to conducting a good interview?
GC: I taught a course on radio once in Foxhall College and the whole course was based on one thing: Only ask questions if you REALLY want to know the answer. Nothing else works.
NA: One thing I love about your interviews: there is often this moment when you are telling the poets something they don’t know about their own poems. You surprise them. In your interview with Lucille Clifton, for example, you tell her that jazz influenced her work. And how. She responds that she loves jazz but has never thought about it. She asks you to explain. And you do, of course, so brilliantly. In that interview and others, I felt the bond you have with the poets/poetry. There is a similar moment in your recent interview with A. B. Spellman, when you correct him about the quality of his early work.
GC: Thank you. So very much.
NA: What was it like to interview Lucille Clifton?
GC: Lucille, one of the GREATS of our generation, yet, always acted as if she were being noticed for the first time—although she had been an icon early on. Her poetry was very important to her, and its inclusion in “the Canon” was something she was vigilant about. Her life had been one overcoming racial obstacles; so anyone paying attention to her work was always rewarded with her warmth and generosity, and a complete giving of “self.”
NA: Then there’s your interview with Louise Glück. I imagine she was more difficult to interview. I felt as if I understood her better after reading your interview. I loved this exchange:
Grace:
I have often said you do something no other poet does as well . . . You can take the emotion, the very fragile feeling, and you build a scenario around it. You build a house around the feeling. Now that sounds like something everyone does, but no one does it exactly as you do. It is misunderstood as autobiography sometime, but it is fiction, except for the feelings. Where did you get your confidence in story?
Louise:
Well, that’s a quite curious question.
Grace:
It’s like fairy tales for adults.
Louise:
It’s actually a rather profound question, and I fear I will not do it justice. It’s immediately starting my thought. But, I think that it’s, in saying to write, you’re going to write that which most concerns you, which most quickens your mind, and then to turn those subjects over with as resourceful and complex a touch as possible.
NA: Can you talk about interviewing Louise Glück?
GC: It is Glück's only radio interview extant (other than the NOBEL) and I know why! The only reason she agreed was because she was one of four Poets Laureate for the Library of Congress Centennial, and the other three agreed. Halfway through the talk she said “I’m tired. I’m stopping.” Knowing this was expected by public radio as a one-hour “Special.” I panicked – but hastily scrambled to ask her a question about Ararat. In that it was early work, she perked up and forgot herself and answered—from there I kept coaxing her up to the hour with questions from early books that got little notice. I love her work.
NA: What is one of your favorite interviews?
GC: David Keplinger. We just seem to jive some sort of way and it felt like riding on a moonbeam.
NA: I can see that, or rather, hear that. Yes, I love how you aptly defined him as a poet of mercy. During the interview, he reads this beautiful poem from his book, Ice.
NA: How did The Poet and the Poem come about?
GC: I was teaching poetry at Antioch College 1970-75 and thought it was fine to have twenty in a class or 200 in a lecture hall, but what if poetry could reach 200,000? Then, I heard a new station going on the air--a JAZZ station--WPFW-FM, perfect for poetry, so I quit Antioch and raised funds for two years as WPFW core staff. Then poetry was prime time every day! After 20 years on-air, I took it to the Library of Congress for national distribution, once again raising the funds for it. (Do you see a $$ pattern?)
NA: So, you continually raise funds for poetry? You do this on your own?
GC: I am a line-item in no one’s budget, so I write grants every year for THE POET AND THE POEM (47 years so far). Now, I am initiating a new reading series at St John’s College of Annapolis; and I’m raising money to fund that enterprise. No one can really help, because all I have is my passion for the project—and no one else has that.
NA: How many interviews have you done?
GC: About 3,500. Hard to say but I’ve presented that many for sure. Once a year on WPFW I had
“live” poets and jazz on for 12 hours straight, so lots got presented. And this “Ribbon of Song”
won the CPB silver medal.
NA: You interviewed for 12 hours straight?
GC: Apologies: I presented for 12 hours straight, producing live poetry and live jazz without interruption. It was a massive preproduction, production and postproduction, organizing all those wild spirits. I think WPFW broadcast it one day a year, for 10 years. Dinner was always late that night.
NA: We poets of the world are so grateful to you. And to Ken. I don’t want to forget to mention your beloved husband, Ken. Did he take part in the interviews when he was alive?
GC: You are making me cry. You, above all, seem to know what Ken was in my life. He was always sitting in the front row; always bankrolling my projects with his Navy salary (he called it ‘government funding for the arts.’) He kept a roof over my head while I played in the sandbox that I loved. Thank you, Nin, for remembering the time you met at the L of C , and now In Memoriam.
NA: Let’s close with a poem for Ken.
Safety by Grace Cavalieri
For Ken Flynn
When you were in the 9th grade and I was in the 7th, you were
a crossing guard keeping order at Junior High School Number 3.
No one
was disobedient when you wore that wide yellow strap across
your chest—
no one bruised another, caused trouble, or so much as threw a
stone—
no one cracked a joke about you, a man in uniform. How did
that yellow vest feed your soul to let you know someday you’d
fly a plane just to feel the power of a strap across your chest.
What
liberation— to know how to be in charge— strong and capable—
flying through gunfire and lightning again and again to come
back to me.
Although we were young, you were 15 and I was 13, since then,
I’ve never
known the world without you. Now I must be 12.
Posted by Nin Andrews on November 21, 2024 at 10:22 AM in Feature, Interviews, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (4)
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NA: As you know, I’m a huge fan of your work—your poems, paintings, interviews, memoir, plays. Sometimes, when I can’t remember how to write or what to ask in an interview, I will google your name. Or if I am just feeling blue—moseying along like a lost soul on a dark street. Your poems are like lit houses I can look inside, their glow spilling into the night. Like "Reversal" from your collection, Owning the Not So Distant World.
Reversal
This poem can do whatever it wants—
It can change the past and make it new—
It can make hollyhocks bloom again
in my mother’s yard,
pink and white against the wall where I sit
in the safety of summer mornings.
These words can take away the scarlet stab of blood
that entered my mother’s brain
as she slept. Here,
take this porcelain cup, blue and white,
And stir some memories for faces no longer seen,
then wander with me to pines that never grew,
to the cottage that was not there because this poem can
leap over any cold moon rising, over any landscape looming
to make this the happiest day of our lives.
The book, like this poem, is mystical and instructive. I am wondering if you could say a few words about it.
GC: You know Nin, as you are a poet, that the imagination is a safe back yard. No stress lives there—no shame— We can go into memory or make believe and create such safety. We are magicians, poets are magicians, who can make flowers grow in the snow just by making the image. We can bring people back to life!! What power. Aren’t we lucky.
NA: You have written many poetry books over the years, and from beginning until now, your poems are consistently lyrical, smart, narrative, heart-felt, and, like your name, full of grace. When I don’t have your books on hand, I will sometimes google and reread your three poems on the Poetry Foundation website. Those poems take me back to my girlhood and an era of great optimism and promise. Of course, it’s easy to idealize the past. But I noticed in your poem, “The Shakedown,” from your book, The Not So Distant World, you are not romanticizing about those days.
The Shakedown
With
this silver spoon
I tell the truth
I came
from a land
where love
was spare
parent better
off not paired
affection
stripped
to its essentials
a film I run
and can turn off
because
from a sea
of pure abundance
comes the trumpet
of happiness
sweeping me
into this place
more golden
than birth.
Could you talk about that poem? About the “sea of pure abundance”?
GC: Well, there was discord in my home, A beautiful mother who was not well, a father who had just love enough for my sister. But the invisible world held everything I needed…‘the sea of abundance.’ I could envision other worlds, enter other books, become characters on stage. Everything I needed was in consciousness. All I had to do (have to do even now) is pull it through me. It is all out there. Everything we need to be happy, to create a state of Being. Some people call it God. Some energy. Some light. I know we walk in it, and it animates us, and we can pull it through us.
NA: Now, I understand the tentative opening to your older poem, “Angelo,” which is a lovely homage to your father. You begin, “If I were to ask what you’d like, it might be to say something/kind about you.” And so, you do. I can relate! Having had a difficult father myself, I have often felt his ghost looking over my shoulder, asking me to write only nice things about him, which became complicated when I was writing my forthcoming memoir. Did you write more poems about your family dynamics?
GC: Yes in every book. I carry on the struggle. I teach my students that they cannot write poetry that matters until they find the wound. Then we will write that story again and again
NA: Tell me how it all began! Who first encouraged you? Who were your role models were?
GC: My college professor approved of my bad poetry and that gave me the space to write long enough to find who I was. I started copying FROST, then I realized I was not a farmer from New England but an Italian (then)-Catholic from Trenton, so maybe I should go with that.
I was writing in the 50’s and the only published women of consequence were Kumin, Sexton, very few...
When I was sitting on the little chairs at the Hermitage Library , the only poetry on the shelf was by Kipling, or the romantics, all men. white. English.
I guess my first love was Edna St Vincent Millay (much under-appreciated). I have all her first editions.
NA: And then there was Ken, your husband, whom I adore, not only because he was the love of your life and a sculptor and a Navy pilot, but also because he encouraged/supported you and your writing career. You say that he told you to write plays? And to write a memoir?
GC: Ken was my muse. He said, “YOU CAN WRITE A PLAY.” So I did–then 10 more–in one decade (terrible plays by today’s standards but this was the cultural revolution and we had stages in lofts and above dentists’ offices…) Ellen Stewart ( NYC’s CAFE LA MAMA) came to Baltimore and opened The Corner Theater Cafe which allowed the new and experimental. I premiered all one-acts there.
NA: I so love your plays! It’s as if you were able to enter the souls of your characters! They are plays and poetry and magic all in one. I especially enjoyed Hyena Play about Mary Wollstonecraft, whom you describe as the mother of feminism. She reminds me of you—an unstoppable force and someone who emerges from a world that might have held others back. How do these plays occur to you? And how does writing and performing a play compare to writing/giving readings of poetry?
GC: Writing a play takes a long time and dedicated focus. I can only write in a pink cotton nightgown in Key West. So with Ken gone, I doubt I’ll write another– I collect images for a long long time before writing. I collect sayings and thoughts like finding a piece of string and adding to it till I have a whole ball, then I write. Every play I write has once been a book of poems . . . so I have the characters already hanging around the house.
Watching a play on stage is very magical. It is never quite the one I wrote. It is always better or worse. And teaches me the art of surrender.
NA: Another of my favorite Grace poems is “Work Is My Secret Lover,” in which you describe work as “the friend who will never leave.” I suppose it’s no secret that to do all that you have done, you must work tirelessly. Can you give me a glimpse of a day in the life of Grace Cavalieri?
I always have to set the alarm as I have an event each day, even SUNDAY- (SUNDAY IS SANGHA, Mindfulness meditation)
I write something every morning.
Mondays and Tuesdays and Fridays are group meditations till noon on zoom
All week, I meet with one of 5 groups: 1) “The Song In The Room Women;” 2)Students I had from ANTIOCH where I taught 1970-75 -still with me– once 20years now in their 70’s, studying the canon; 3) Haiku; 4) Play reading; 5) Creative Writing with Antioch poets.
I host a monthly SATURDAY series at St John's College so managing that
I schedule poets for my radio /podcast/youtube show
3x a month I record/ broadcast, sometimes in LOC studio, sometimes zoom, then distribute on e-serv, apple podcasts and public radio.
I have a small poetry press that produces one book every 2 months so that takes attention, editing, production etc
I am always writing grants for St Johns College, and radio…I am not an item on anyone’s budget so it is a constant process.
I check in with my kids every day
Several of my groups I cook for -when we meet- as that is my hobby
I try to swim every day but the wheel of time has me doing 3x a week lately
At 6pm I SHUT THE SHUTTERS and go to bed with books, papers and TV and watch MSNBC and CNN, reading during commercials
Tuesday night is MARRIED AT FIRST SIGHT on TV and SUNDAY night is 90 DAY FIANCE
I gave up LOVE AFTER LOCKUP.
Today I went to Baltimore to work with my composer of 40 years, she has dementia but can still write music. We have just finished “Ken’s Song” about how he healed himself from Viet Nam by sculpting. And she is working on REVERSAL, the poem on the back of DISTANT WORLD book.
NA: Okay, so you do more in a week than I do in a year. And we poets have you to thank for your tireless work on our behalf!!
Maybe we can end with one a haiku from your latest book?
Here’s the first Haiku in I HAIKU TOO
on the autumn branch
one leaf hanging
dances anyway
Posted by Nin Andrews on November 14, 2024 at 07:35 PM in Book Recommendations, Feature, Interviews, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (4)
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I keep trying to figure out how we arrived here, and what country and planet we are now living in/on. When did this all begin? I grew up in the 60's in the midst of massive social change with integration and women's liberation and the Vietnam War protests and Martin Luther King and JFK and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Ram Dass and Timothy Leary. It was the Age of Aquarius, of peace and love and expanded consciousness. It was also the beginning of the end of the New Deal Republicans. I remember Barry Goldwater, whom my parents described as a political outlier with his extremely conservative and libertarian agenda and his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of
1964 . . .
I love this poem that takes me back to the 60's.
For the Slip’N Slide
by George Bilgere
For the WHAM-O Manufacturing Company
which in 1961 invented the Slip’N Slide.
For Brenda Harris’s shady back yard
with its long fairway of soft grass where she
and her sister whose name is now lost
set up the Slip’N Slide and attached it to the hose
under the burning summer sky of East LA.
How Brenda and her sister and I ran
in our swimsuits, took a flying leap, and skidded,
screaming bloody murder on our tummies.
How we did this ten thousand times, howling
our Tarzan cries and never tiring of it. For Brenda,
who invented the Double Decker, whereby
the two of us would run, Brenda just behind me,
and I would belly flop onto my stomach
and she would land on my back and we streaked
across the yard out of control and smashed
into her mother’s hydrangeas. For her mother,
who didn’t get mad. Who at lunch time put out
a pitcher of iced lemonade or Kool-Aid
and a bunch of Velveeta and Wonder Bread sandwiches
on the table under its green umbrella and we kids
sat there eating like royalty. How nothing
was better than those Wonder Bread sandwiches.
For the Safeway supermarket down the road,
which employed Brenda’s father in the produce department,
where he earned the salary that paid for the Slip’N Slide.
How he would fill a couple of shopping bags
with day-old lettuce and carrots and oranges
and onions and radishes and potatoes
destined for the dumpster behind the Safeway
and leave them on the front porch of our house
where my mother would find them when she got home
from her job as a guard at Fontana Women’s Prison,
the only work she could find after my father died
of booze and left her with the three kids
and a falling apart little stucco house. How
accepting the day-old produce hurt her
even more than working at the women’s prison
and collecting food stamps because in her former life
as socialite wife of a well-to-do drunk
she had employed people like Brenda’s father,
who entered from the back door when they came to work.
For the women incarcerated in Fontana Women’s Prison,
whose crimes, whatever they were, gave my mother a job.
How she never thanked him. For that summer
under the cobalt LA sky, where a place
called Watts had yet to ignite, and our Tarzan cries
echoed in the yard and the cold lemonade
made our heads ache and the days went on
forever, the Slip’N Slide like an endless river
which arrived one day at a fork which none of us
could see coming, and Brenda and her sister,
her mother and her father drifted off
into a place called African America,
and my mother and sisters and I drifted off
into something called gated communities,
the Slip’N Slide, the Wonder Bread sandwiches,
the bags of groceries long forgotten.
For Brenda, and the Double Decker that summer
a lifetime ago, and how the two of us now
keep on journeying deeper and deeper
into a country growing stranger,
less recognizable, more lonely every day.
Posted by Nin Andrews on November 07, 2024 at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)
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I went out to eat this week with several friends, and I couldn't believe how complicated it was to complete our order. One friend has celiac; another is lactose intolerant; another is on a low fiber diet; yet another is allergic to peanuts. And then I have a friend with alpha gal syndrome. In these parts, someone always has alpha gal.
But ordering was the easy part. We had all promised not discuss politics. So we decided to talk about food instead--the foods we love and can eat. They asked me what my favorite food poem was. Of course, there are too many delicious food poems to choose from, but my first thought was of this one by Diane Ackerman.
THE CONSOLATION OF APRICOTS
by Diane Ackerman
Especially in early spring,
when the sun offers a thin treacle of warmth,
I love to sit outdoors
and eat sense-ravishing apricots.
Born on sun-drenched trees in Morocco,
the apricots have flown the Atlantic
like small comets, and I can taste
broiling North Africa in their flesh.
Somewhere between a peach and a prayer,
they taste of well water
and butterscotch and dried apples
and desert simooms and lust.
Sweet with a twang of spice,
a ripe apricot is small enough to devour
as two hemispheres.
Ambiguity is its hallmark.
How to eat an apricot:
first warm its continuous curve
in cupped hands, holding it
as you might a brandy snifter,
then caress the velvety sheen
with one thumb, and run your fingertips
over its nap, which is shorter
than peach fuzz, closer to chamois.
Tawny gold with a blush on its cheeks,
an apricot is the color of shame and dawn.
One should not expect to drink wine
at mid-winter, Boethius warned.
What could be more thrilling
than ripe apricots out of season,
a gush of taboo sweetness
to offset the savage wistfulness of early spring?
Always eat apricots at twilight,
preferably while sitting in a sunset park,
with valley lights starting to flicker on
and the lake spangled like a shield.
Then, while a trail of bright ink tattoos the sky,
notice how the sun washes the earth
like a woman pouring her gaze
along her lover’s naked body,
each cell receiving the tattoo of her glance.
Wait for that moment
of arousal and revelation,
then sink your teeth into the flesh of an apricot.
Posted by Nin Andrews on November 01, 2024 at 01:43 PM in Feature, Nin Andrews Comics | Permalink | Comments (2)
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These days I don’t want to read the news. I don’t want to turn on NPR. I don’t want to check my phone and read all those annoying political texts.
Instead, I want to turn to my favorite things. Poetry, of course, is number one.
Every morning my inbox is full of those poem-a-day emails. My favorite, Poetry Town, is sent out by George Bilgere whose choice of poems, commentary, and accompanying photographs are always a delight.
Here's a poem and commentary from Poetry Town that was posted on October 15th.
Myrtle
by John Ashbery
How funny your name would be
if you could follow it back to where
the first person thought of saying it,
naming himself that, or maybe
some other persons thought of it
and named that person. It would
be like following a river to its source,
which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
They just automatically appear at a place
where they get wider, and soon a real
river comes along, with fish and debris,
regal as you please, and someone
has already given it a name: St. Benno
(saints are popular for this purpose) or, or
some other name, the name of his
long-lost girlfriend, who comes
at long last to impersonate that river,
on a stage, her voice clanking
like its bed, her clothing of sand
and pasted paper, a piece of real technology,
while all along she is thinking, I can
do what I want to do. But I want to stay here.
From Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, Ecco, 2007.
Why I Chose This Poem
Over the years I’ve learned the hard way not to fall into the trap of trying to explain what a John Ashbery poem “means.” Many a student of mine has dozed off while I stood floundering around at the lectern in a vain attempt to make sense of that canny old wizard. And while his poems can and often do drive me crazy, there is also something wonderful about the teasing way they almost always almost make sense, the same way Mae West almost always almost let you see it all.
A second favorite thing that helps me through times like this: essays. This week, my favorite is an essay from The Georgia Review called “The Essay as Realm” by Elissa Gabbert in which Gabbert describes the architectural qualities of her writing as well as her love of books on architecture.
She writes:
“I think this is important: memories and ideas happen in a place. An essay is a place for ideas; it has to feel like a place. It has to give one the feeling of entering a room.”
“Architecture books are full of good writing, and they’re also full of good writing advice. Venturi writes that he likes buildings that are 'boring as well as ‘interesting.’ He puts interesting in quotes, but not boring—interesting is the more suspicious category. I feel the same about books—I don’t trust books that aren’t a little boring.”
“I think of an essay as a realm for both the writer and the reader. When I’m working on an essay, I’m entering a loosely defined space. If we borrow Alexander’s terms again, the essay in progress is “the site”: “It is essential to work on the site,” he writes, in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction; “Work on the site, stay on the site, let the site tell you its secrets.” Just by beginning to think about an essay as such—by forming the intention to write on an idea or theme—I’m opening a portal, I’m creating a site, a realm.”
As the daughter of an architect, I am particularly taken with Gabbert’s insights. I have always loved blueprints, and I love the very idea of designing a poem, an essay, a story as a house that you will build, enter and live inside for a period of time.
Reading this essay, I was reminded of the family house that my father added onto, designing bathrooms with tubs that curved into the walls and secret passageways and unreachable cupboards—one you had to climb up a ladder and reach into it with a pole to knock things out—that was the hiding place for Santa’s gifts. The walls of many of the rooms featured built-in bookcases. In fact, the entire house felt like a giant library with books on every wall and table and sometimes spilling onto the floors.
After my mother died, the University of Virginia bought and remodeled our house and took out all the bookcases and weird bathrooms and secret passageways and unreachable cupboards. Now, the house is like so many any other houses—generic and unmemorable. Not a unique moment in it. If I were to compare the house to a poem, I'd say someone took it to an MFA workshop and took everyone's advice--editing out all it's interesting features.
I love thinking of poetry in relation to other arts--which brings me to a third favorite thing: Grace Cavalieri—I don't know whether I like her writing or her artwork best. Lately I've been spending some time checking out her paintings.
Posted by Nin Andrews on October 24, 2024 at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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I wouldn't call this a comic exactly, but I've been thinking about revisions a lot lately. In the last month, two friends sent me their manuscripts that had already been accepted for publication and announced, "I want to change everything! What do I do?" I would call this a poet's problem, but then I remember reading that Hemingway rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms 39 times. Dorothy Parker said it took her months to write a single story because if she wrote five words, she edited seven. Amor Towles submitted his most recent book, Table for Two, and then took the book back to work on it some more. He also edits his books between the hardback and paperback editions.
Posted by Nin Andrews on October 17, 2024 at 12:02 PM in Feature, Nin Andrews Comics | Permalink | Comments (2)
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I am always fascinated by the questions poets and writers are asked in interviews and at readings about how they write--as if it's a mystery, or as if there's a recipe. At the same time, I love some of the answers poets and writers give to the question. I like to imagine a student going home and doing whatever these famous writers were said to have done.
Posted by Nin Andrews on October 08, 2024 at 08:02 AM in Feature, Nin Andrews Comics | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman