Valerie Duff: Russian Chapter
Deserters call and wave their sacks
at the carriage bound for Petersburg.
Christopher Bursk: Nor are we fit to force our way across
when I was a child
I wanted with all my heart to be the one
to suffer
Tayve Neese: Still, we wait for sounds of plumage
Still, we wait for sounds of plumage
in this world even angels shun.
Marianne Moore: Marriage
I wonder what Adam and Eve
think of it by this time,
this firegilt steel
alive with goldenness…
Audio: Gregory Corso reads his poem “Marriage”
Beat generation poet Gregory Corso reads his classic poem “Marriage” from his book, The Happy Birthday of Death, first published in 1960.
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Maybe I Have No Ideas
Eating a turkey sub from the school cafeteria
I suddenly think of the blonde woman
whose marriage is falling apart and the dark
circles under her eyes
George Drew: Positive Space
he taught me how to make a military tuck
of the sheets and blankets; the way a quarter should bounce,
and when it did, the way he’d smile and clap my back. I lived for that.
Josephine Dickinson: The Water Bearers
we wriggled and followed
the path upstream,
coigned in its armbends, whinsill, lime,
dumped peatblocks,
humped heather, deer grass
Video: Hurray For the Riff Raff | PA’LANTE
Winner of the 2019 Jury Award at SXSW, Director Kristian Mercado Figueroa’s music video PA’LANTE performed by Hurray for the Riff Raff takes us inside the Puerto Rican experience of life post Hurricane Maria and the pressures facing an estranged family attempting to reconnect amid the wreckage.
Michael Simms: Heart of Glass
In Herzog’s great visual opera
The hero stands on a cliff
Above a valley where a river
Of molten glass carries
Light to the sea
Video: Poetry and Immortality in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale | Belinda Jack
John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” — a lecture by Oxford Professor Belinda Jack
Doug Anderson: Negative Capability
…art that honors the art and artist as well as its content, and apprehends it as more than its socio-political reality. Art is hard to do and not everybody can do it. It is not merely a pretext for theory.
Robert Bernard Hass: Oedipus in Thebes
When he left the palace, the streets were nearly empty
Save for the women wailing at the altar, rending air
With sobs and litanies, the smoke from their incense pots
Thick and fragrant, perfuming the shrouded dead.
