by Unknown
becomes too familiar, rage a priori—a buzzing that he doesn’t quite hear anymore. Like people who live near the trainyard and can sleep through the night. You know those people when you meet them, their voices carrying over everything else, voices raw and thin from yelling all day. A Camaro in the passing lane shakes with bass, with Led
Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” looped and a hiphop vocal track added. What’s that anger? It’s a kind of violence you hear, a violence that fills everything you see. Inside the ear. What’s more intimate than that? Rocky Marciano leans into a lucky one and his ear swells up. He’s stone deaf within the year. No buzz, no bell to end the round—just the vast echo of finitude reaching out past the ropes at the edge of the ring.
(2000)
ANSELM BERRIGAN (1972–)
The Page Torn Out
Curtains open to a page being torn out of a notebook
PAGE: I am the page torn out!
NOTEBOOK: That felt wonderful! Tear out another one!
A second page is torn out
SECOND PAGE: I am the page torn out! I cause pleasure being torn!
FIRST PAGE: No, I am the page torn out!
SECOND PAGE: You are merely a precedent! I am the page torn out!
UNIVERSE (lying on a yellow bedsheet decorated with cows): Yawn.
NOTEBOOK: “. . . and the universe lay on a yellow bedsheet covered with cows, yawning . . .”
The universe shrieks after reading the words in the notebook, & tears out the page upon which they were written
THIRD PAGE: I am the page torn out!
A curtain behind the stage raises to reveal countless pages standing in a vast stretch of desert wearing Roman slave garb & screaming “I am the page torn out!”
Curtains fall
(1999)
KATHERINE LEDERER (1972–)
According to the Appetites
Let birds—let fly—that it was good. There was a night and then a day—and every living creature, moved—was good.
The light was good—the air—the man—the man became a living thing—and there he put the man who formed—the earth—no rain, no no.
When you touch delight, you will not die.
The door—the door—is hard to bear.
I shall be hidden—nothing sweet—your days—your face—and now you might—and at the east—which he—was taken—turned away—and heard—the voice.
I am—open—I am—out—the firstlings—and the seedlings.
(1998)
ANDREW ZAWACKI (1972–)
Two Poems from Masquerade
4
Return was a myth departure coined as incentive: we didn’t believe it, bracken and twig, but moved ahead anyway. Negotiating winter’s frisk and what remained of its pane, worn away by powerlines and barns the rain brought down, we kept to where the sun revamped its reach: upholstered clouds and amassings of geese, making their exodus vocal, mountains that seemed to change their position, ruptures in the road the crews ignored, before defaulting to some other damage control. It would not have been false to conjure transparence or zero, to coax the sight of scaffolds ghosting white pine, ilex, tea tree, birch. The metabolism of snowshoe and compass: nothing could stall it or usher it onward, not when it had already been stated, and called us so we came.
12
Asleep on the shattered surface of a cinematic, lunar creek, one of us dreamt the silhouette of a dog, yet found upon waking it hadn’t strayed. Such were the spells of a landscape that couldn’t be trusted although we’d devised it ourselves, if only to attribute otherwise: a zone where no one believed any longer the hollows that brought them this far, where flowers were blooming again, without any scent.
(2001)
JAMEY DUNHAM (1973–)
An American Story
Two possums dressed as children (their mother raised them as such) were crying when their father (not a possum) came home. Their mother (not a possum either) was already there. She stayed home with the children everyday and kept house (though actually they lived in a bog swamp). There was a family dog too but it doesn’t come up until later (when it dies). Now the mother had sent the children outside to play so she could get some cleaning done (an optimistic thought in a bog swamp). The children sat under a tree and ate the apples that had fallen to the ground (they were rotten). The ripe apples were still hanging from the boughs but the children were not allowed to climb the tree because they hung from their tails (which disturbed their parents to no end). As the children stuffed their mouths with the brown, sticky fruit, their dog, Ernest (a Laplander), bounded across the street to join them and was struck by a car. Now I’d like to tell you the dog died quickly, so I will, but actually it was a long, agonizing death involving hours of grueling pain and convulsions. The children were devastated. They ran into the house bawling, which is how their father found them when he came home (with the money he had stolen from the bank). He was a raccoon and a master thief. He and his accomplice had been planning the heist for weeks. His wife had known nothing about it (although she knew his accomplice all too well). He was a dashing possum with a broad toothy grin and a weakness for tragic women.
(1999)
MATTHEA HARVEY (1973–)
The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away
Everyone was happier. But where did the sadness go? People wanted to know. They didn’t want it collecting in their elbows or knees then popping up later. The girl who thought of the ponies made a lot of money. Now a month’s supply of pills came in a hard blue case with a handle. You opened it & found the usual vial plus six tiny ponies of assorted shapes & sizes, softly breathing in the Styrofoam. Often they had to be pried out & would wobble a little when first put on the ground. In the beginning the children tried to play with them, but the sharp hooves nicked their fingers & the ponies refused to jump over pencil hurdles. The children stopped feeding them sugar water & the ponies were left to break their legs on the gardens’ gravel paths or drown in the gutters. On the first day of the month, rats gathered on doorsteps & spat out only the bitter manes. Many a pony’s last sight was a bounding squirrel with its tail hovering over its head like a halo. Behind the movie theater the hardier ponies gathered in packs amongst the cigarette butts, getting their hooves stuck in wads of gum. They lined the hills at funerals, huddled under folding chairs at weddings. It became a matter of pride if one of your ponies proved unusually sturdy. People would smile & say, “This would have been an awful month for me,” pointing to the glossy palomino trotting energetically around their ankles. Eventually, the ponies were no longer needed. People had learned to imagine their sadness trotting away. & when they wanted something more tangible, they could always go to the racetrack & study the larger horses’ faces. Gloom, #341, with those big black eyes, was almost sure to win.
(2001)
SARAH MANGUSO (1974–)
Nepenthe
Van Gogh said he agreed with Courbet, that he couldn’t paint angels because he’d never seen one—and then painted them as he saw them in paintings by the Italians.
Another of my friends is dead. His parents are doctors. There is no way to ensure your children will outlive you.
The Greeks believed in a potion to make them forget grief and suffering.
A friend writes: My grandparents are 88 now and that makes them very quiet.
I didn’t believe in my death until last night. There was no reason to believe in it until then. There is still no reason to believe in it.
I like it when we believe in something like to the stars by hard ways.
But where is the Aldebaran that I can only get to with grief?
The doctors invite me to an interminable meeting with joy,
but I’m on my knees in the music room, driving the brush tip into my open eye.
I am painting myself a bridge. I can almost see it . . .
(2002)
What We Miss
Who says it’s so easy to save a life? In the middle of an interview for the
job you might get you see the cat from the window of the seventeenth floor just as he’s crossing the street against traffic, just as you’re answering a question about your worst character flaw and lying that you are too careful. What if you keep seeing the cat at every moment you are unable to save him? Failure is more like this than like duels and marathons. Everything can be saved, and bad timing prevents it. Every minute, you are answering the question and looking out the window of the church to see your one great love blinded by the glare, crossing the street, alone.
(2002)
JENNY BOULLY (1976–)
He appeared then, wearing the clothes in which we left him. “Please get in. Come with me,” he said. But my mother had warned me about this before. Do not go, she said. Do not go with those who have gone before us. They will take you where you are not ready to belong. So I shook my head and said no, but offered to follow instead. And so, with great purpose and determination, I pulled the cord and started the red lawn mower and gathered white flowers in my pocket. Smoke trailed behind his black car, emptying like all of the past, those dresses which we cloak time with, and through the miles, on dirt roads, highways, wooden bridges, I pushed the lawn mower along until it finally succumbed to its natural loss. He drove on, without me trailing behind. It grew dark. People with crooked fingers clung to wire fences, whispering. They passed cigarettes of tobacco and marijuana back and forth through the chainlink. They said, “Here, come smoke some of this.” I did not recognize any of them to bear the faces of the dead, but still I declined, saying, “I must fix this machine” (which was leaking green fluid and sputtering half-held coughs). “I cannot stop. There is someone I’ve promised to meet. I must catch up. He is still moving in wait.”
(2000)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Heartfelt thanks go to Mark Bibbins for his valued assistance and to Michele Rosenthal for her help in the permissions process. I felt at times as if I had the benefit of a team of advisers, and that was a lucky thing, for no single reader can hope to keep up with the proliferation of prose poems out there. For their recommendations I’d like to thank Michael Anderson, Nin Andrews, Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Mary Jo Bang, Rachel Barenblat, Alan Bernheimer, Robert Bly, Catherine Bowman, Henri Cole, Jamey Dunham, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Amy Gerstler, Roger Gilbert, Laurence Goldstein, Stacey Harwood, Robert Hass, John Hollander, Peter Johnson, Steve Monte, Fred Muratori, Ron Padgett, Danielle Pafunda, Robert Pinsky, John Schertzer, Michael Schiavo, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Susan Swenson, James Tate, Ed Webster, and Susan Wheeler. John Ashbery kindly allowed me to reproduce the collage that appears on the cover of this book. Martha Kinney, Allyson Salazar, and Gabrielle Zane wrote essays, still unpublished, that I found very useful. Danielle Pafunda did important research. I’m indebted as ever to Glen Hartley of Writers’ Representatives and to Gillian Blake and Rachel Sussman at Scribner.
Grateful acknowledgment is made of the publications from which the poems in this volume were chosen. Unless specifically stated otherwise, copyright to the poems is held by the individual poets. Diligent efforts have been undertaken to locate all copyright holders. If any have been inadvertently omitted or overlooked, acknowledgment will gladly be made in future printings.
Agha Shahid Ali: “Return to Harmony 3” from The Country Without a Post Office. Copyright (c) 1997 by Agha Shahid Ali. Reprinted by permission of the literary estate of Agha Shahid Ali and W.W. Norton. First appeared in Verse.
Nin Andrews: “Notes on the Orgasm” from The Book of Orgasms. Copyright (c) 2000 by Nin Andrews. Reprinted by permission of the poet and Cleveland State University Poetry Center. “Always Have a Joyful Mind” appeared in Another Chicago Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Rae Armantrout: “Bases” from Necromance. Copyright (c) 1991 by Rae Armantrout. Reprinted by permission of the poet and Sun & Moon Press. “Imaginary Places” appeared in Boston Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet. “Middle Men” appeared in The Germ. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
John Ashbery: “Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are” and “Haibun 6” from A Wave. Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of George Borchardt for the poet. “A Nice Presentation,” “Disagreeable Glimpses,” and “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland” from Chinese Whispers. Copyright (c) 2002 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of the poet and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Margaret Atwood: “Women’s Novels” and “In Love with Raymond Chandler” from Good Bones and Simple Murders. Copyright (c) 1983, 1992, 1994 by W.O. Toad. A Nan A. Talese book. Used by permission of Doubleday. Also used by permission of McClelland & Steward, the Canadian publishers.
B.J. Atwood-Fukuda: “The Wreck of the Platonic” appeared in American Letters & Commentary. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
W. H. Auden: “Vespers” from W. H. Auden: The Collected Poems. Copyright (c) 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith, and Monroe K. Spears, executors of the estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House.
Michael Benedikt: “The Doorway of Perception” from Night Cries (Wesleyan University Press, 1976). Copyright (c) by Michael Benedikt. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
April Bernard: “Exegesis” from Psalms. Copyright (c) 1993 by April Bernard. Reprinted by permission of the poet and W.W. Norton & Co.
Charles Bernstein: “Comraderie turns to rivalry . . .” from Islets/Irritations (Roof Books). Copyright (c) 1992 by Charles Bernstein. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Anselm Berrigan: “The Page Torn Out” from Zero Star Hotel. Copyright (c) 2002 by Anselm Berrigan. Reprinted by permission of the poet and Edge Books. First appeared in The Hat.
Mark Bibbins: Two sections from “Blasted Fields of Clover Bring Harrowing and Regretful Sighs” appeared in American Letters & Commentary. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Frank Bidart: “Borges and I” from Desire. Copyright (c) 1997 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by permission of the poet and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Elizabeth Bishop: “12 O’Clock News” from The Complete Poems: 1927– 1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Richard Blanco: “Mango, Number 61” from City of a Hundred Fires. Copyright (c) 1998 by Richard Blanco. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Robert Bly: “The Hockey Poem” and “Warning to the Reader” from Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems. Copyright (c) 1999 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of the poet and HarperCollins. “A Rusty Tin Can” appeared in TriQuarterly. Reprinted by permission of the poet. “One Day at a Florida Key” appears by permission of the poet.
Jenny Boully: “He appeared then . . .” appeared in Paragraph under the title “White Flowers and Wire Fence.” Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Catherine Bowman: “No Sorry” from Rock Farm (Gibbs Smith Publishers, 1996). Copyright (c) 1996 by Catherine Bowman. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Joe Brainard: “Freud” and “History” appeared in Roy Rogers. Reprinted by permission of the literary estate of Joe Brainard.
Stephanie Brown: “Commencement Address” from Allegory of the Supermarket. Copyright (c) 1998 by Stephanie Brown. First appeared in Yellow Silk. Reprinted by permission of the poet and the University of Georgia Press.
Michael Burkard: “A Conversation about Memory” from In a White Light (L’Epervier Press, 1977) and Ruby for Grief (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981). Copyright (c) by Michael Burkard. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Fran Carlen: “Anna Karenina” appeared in The Germ. “Anal Nap” appeared in Shiny. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Anne Carson: “On Waterproofing,” “On Orchids,” “On Hedonism,” and “On Shelter” from Plainwater. Copyright (c) 1995 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of the poet and Alfred A. Knopf.
Maxine Chernoff: “His Pastime,” “The Inner Life,” and “Vanity, Wisconsin�
� appeared in Utopia TV Store (Yellow Press, 1979) and Leap Year Day (Jensen-Daniels, 1999). Copyright (c) by Maxine Chernoff. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Tom Clark: “Death, Revenge and the Profit Motive” appeared in Heartbreak Hotel (The Toothpaste Press, 1981). Copyright (c) by Tom Clark. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Killarney Clary: “Because the ones I work for . . .” and “Life is boundless . . .” from Who Whispered Near Me. Copyright (c) 1989 by Killarney Clary. Reprinted by permission of the poet and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Andrei Codrescu: “De Natura Rerum,” “Secret Training,” and “Power” from Secret Training (Grape Press, 1973). Copyright (c) by Andrei Codrescu. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Billy Collins: “Five Fondly Remembered Passages from My Childhood Reading” appeared in Solo. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Hart Crane: “Havana Rose” from Complete Poems of Hart, edited by Marc Simon. Copyright (c) 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright (c) 1986 by Marc Simon. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
e.e. cummings: “i was sitting in mcsorley’s” Copyright (c) 1923, 1925, 1951, 1953, 1991 by the trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright (c) 1976 from Complete Poems: 1904–1962, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Lydia Davis: “The Thirteenth Woman,” “In the Garment District,” and “Agreement” from Almost No Memory. Copyright (c) 1997 by Lydia Davis. Reprinted by permission of the author and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.