Only until this cigarette is ended, A little moment at the end of all, While on the floor the quiet ashes fall, And in the firelight to a lance extended, Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended, The broken shadow dances on the wall, I will permit my memory to recall The vision of you, by all my dreams attended. And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done. Yours is a face of which I can forget The color and the features, every one, The words not ever, and the smiles not yet; But in your day this moment is the sun Upon a hill, after the sun has set.        Rel ..read more

“The Dover Bitch” A Criticism of Life: for Andrews Wanning So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them, And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me, And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad All over, etc., etc.' Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read Sophocles in a fairly good translation And caught that bitter allusion to the sea, But all the time he was talking she had in mind The notion of what his whiskers would feel like On the back of her neck. She told me later on That after a while she got to looking out At the lig ..read more

Of all the major Australian poets, none have captured the Australian idiom as faithfully and expansively as Alan Wearne. A tacit member of the famed “Generation of ‘68”—the disputed label given to a group of poets who came to prominence at the end of the 1960s and reshaped the nation’s (then predominantly conservative) poetic landscape—Wearne has fashioned a truly original and idiosyncratic oeuvre, renowned for its narrative, character driven poetry. Often epic in their form and scale (his most successful published works are arguably the verse novels The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers Part 1 ..read more

from "The Complete History of the Boy" The boy was mad at his mother who didn’t hang up the phone right away when he fell and hurt his head. He was indignant. “Hurts are more important than inventions.” He dreamed his father died. “Mama told me in the car.” When he woke up he climbed into bed with his father, happy. He wanted to discuss the floor plan of the house: “Is my room over the dining room?” He wanted to know which was more important, the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. The former is a symbol of liberty, the latter a symbol of industry, his mother explained. That clin ..read more

I've been worrying a lot lately. On a global scale, I've been worrying about . . . well, just about everything. On a personal scale, I've been worrying about my forthcoming memoir, Son of a Bird. I feel I might have spoken too freely in it  . . .   My father used to say, “Only the artists are free.” It was his answer to Rousseau’s “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” A wannabe artist himself, he gave my siblings and me drawing pencils and pads as children, as well as drawing books—the kind that taught you how to draw a horse or a cow or a cat by starting with a c ..read more

                                      ________________________________________________ Clip / Caste   It’s the Friday before a holiday so the barber shop is wild with boys, all from my school, none a friend.   Glum in the back, I wait to be summoned to one of four barbers. Jimmy the owner up front is the one you want   and the cool boys from the nice blocks swarm his chair, jostling each other, laughing big laughs   until they are called to the clippers, while I— predictably—get ..read more

Greatness - the scherzo of Mahler's second symphony ("the Resurrection") with superimposed words culled from Beckett and others. . . . and here is the scherzo without the words:        Related Stories Great soundtracks: "Street Scene" by Alfred Newman   ..read more

Sometimes you're tired maybe because you Didn't sleep last night or you drank too much So even if you did sleep it wasn't a real sleep  Yet somehow you make it through the day  Until around 4 or 5 pm you lie down and sleep Till maybe midnight when you briefly wake up  To check the time and then go back to sleep Clear until morning when you at last awaken To the sun shining and the birds chirping  And any dog or cat you had in your life  Is there jumping up and down with joy and  Some even peeing with wild excitement and  Because they can all talk now they ..read more

As a graduate student at Columbia, I alternated with Michael Andre as host of a weekly radio program for WKCR-FM. We called it "The Only Poetry Show." In the first weeks, we played Luciano Berio's "Sinfonia" and recordings of T. S. Eliot and other poets. Morris Dickstein came and talked about contemporary ficrion; Ron Horning read Robert Desnos's "Fantomas." Bill Zavatsky talked about writing poetry while Bill Evans played piano. There were songs from Franz Schubert, "The Three Penny Opera," and William Blake, and poems from John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins. What fun to be interviewed, mo ..read more

On July 9th, Norton published Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne. This is the best book I have read on Plath....and I have read them all. And so has Emily Van Duyne, who is able to build upon and refute earlier accounts of Plath’s life. Van Duyne confirms (with evidence!) everything you may have suspected about Hugh's abuse and control, and the ultimate shaping of his wife’s legacy as the madwoman/witch.  But Van Duyne also captures the light/wonderful parts of the Plath's legacy. Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation is an extremely well-researched account, which hig ..read more