Doug Anderson: When there is nowhere else to go
When there is nowhere else to go. When language shatters under the weight of what it tries to hold. When you cannot eat, cannot find peace anywhere. When you say … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Eulogy
When I was nineteen and the drummer in the show band that backed you, you took me to your bed. I had been speechless in your presence: your honey whiskey … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Thank you, Mahmoud Darwish, for your poems
Thank you, Mahmoud Darwish, for your poems. Every fine poet opens the door to where all poems can be found. Here, poets light candles for one another. Follow me. See … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: One of those Dreams
You’re trying to get somewhere and each door you open leads you into another dream and you seem to be getting further and further from the place you know you … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: On Risk and Compassion
Constant irony, constant obliquity, perpetual hipness, constant skipping the stone over deep water, afraid to speak, afraid to stand up for something, afraid to expose the heart, afraid to mean, … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Tucson, 1970
I remember standing in a long line being processed into jail. Guy behind me is furious: they’ve handcuffed him to a transvestite who is smiling at his discomfort. They put … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Waltz Me Deeper
I seem to be arriving at a goal I had not aspired to. The distance between my writing and my being in the world is lessening. My speaking voice is … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Scattering my Mother’s Ashes on the Family Plot at Hickman Kentucky
. Down into the black, flesh curdled dirt. Down into the family charnel, marinade in whiskey, with the murderers and soul murderers against whom you honed your tongue. Down there … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Prayer for Paul
The fist that held your heart releases, the hot knife of your shame turns to water, the kernels of blackened corn by which you counted your imagined crimes, are carried … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Walt Whitman at the Huntington Malls along Walt Whitman Avenue
. I celebrate myself even amid this sheet-rocked temple of kitsch, even in the asphalt tributaries of traffic in which giant Bentleys bumble like Junebugs through the lesser Hondas of … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Belchertown
. This old half-mad woman who pushes an empty baby carriage up and down the sidewalk in Belchertown. I realized I’ve never looked in her face. It is unbearable. All … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: On Having
After my mother died in 2001, I found myself un-layering years of accumulated expectations. One of those expectations, and what I haven’t achieved, was to have a middle-class life, get … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: An Ars Poetica
In the dark of the jeweled cities, below the mirror
buildings, in the wind that funnels up the street canyons
blowing hats off and women’s hair sideways
poets are passing a small flame from one pair
of cupped hands to another.
Doug Anderson: What is Poetry For?
I’ve been thinking about all the conversations about whether or not poetry “matters” in this culture and thinking maybe it’s a silly question. We have a country on the verge … Continue reading
