November 2, 2017
“Finally all indications of a subject / Began to fade”
The poet John Ashbery died on September 3, 2017, and I spent September and October reading the flood of reminiscences. It interests me that Ashbery—he of the slippery speaker(s) and […]
October 16, 2017
“THIS IS THE STORY OF HOW I GOT TO LIVE”: On Lynn Melnick & Surviving the Landscape
I don’t even know you. Sure, I do the most uncareful things when I’m miles from here. It’s all that freedom I don’t recognize. —Lynn Melnick, “Landscape with […]
September 30, 2017
On Atonement & The Year for which We Are Asking
On Yom Kippur, we ask that we are written into The Book of Life for one more year. And in thinking of The Book, I keep returning to this […]
September 26, 2017
Returning to New Houses We Rebuild Together
Yesterday, you began this essay with: She bears the wood and the forgotten knowledge of the wood, carries its many names, a weight that brings the poet no unity. And […]
September 21, 2017
This Rosh Hashanah, We Throw the Door Open
To go home, leave crumbs. When the wood circles you back here instead, let the lost and the impossible ripen in you, ripen and go. “What is Growing […]
September 7, 2017
Remembering John Ashbery’s Time and Space
Vladimir Nabokov’s confession in Speak, Memory (1951) that he does not believe in time might have been more shocking if it had come earlier in literary history; by the modernist […]
August 31, 2017
Strange & Endlessly Afoot at the Circle K
Imagine our future selves as the much-harder-to-follow laws of us. Because writing a new poem requires a future self, which is not the same thing as a new self […]
August 23, 2017
Charlottesville Fabulous
My big brother lives in Charlottesville. We grew up together in Groveport, Ohio, rode the bus with a girl whose dad was a Columbus cop, whose grandfather was a World […]
August 16, 2017
To Mi Ciela, My Lion’s Laugh-Love, My Little Panpipe
Dear niece. Dear eight-year-old asker of pointed questions and WHY and WHY again. I wish I had answers for you today. I wish you lived closer or that I could […]
August 6, 2017
Why the Horse Fights the Metaphor: On Love & Tu B’Av
There were no better days for the people of Israel than the Fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur, since on these days the daughters of Jerusalem go out dressed […]
August 3, 2017
Literary Firsts & Worsts
A writer approached me after my workshop at Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator event to tell me this was the first writing conference she’d ever attended. Her comment got me thinking of […]
July 31, 2017
Mix-Tape I: Sometimes You Choose Never
In yesterday’s essay, I wrote in part on the difficulties of coming back daily from the noise, especially when it’s not just noise, but policies and public discourse that affect us […]