Twining the Text

Witness I saw that a star had broken its rope in the stables of heaven— This homeless one will find her home in the foothills of a green century. Who sleeps beside still waters, wakes. The terrestrial hands of the heaven clock comb out the comet’s tangled mane and twelve strands float free. In the […]

Heather Bell

Love The truth about Klimt is: when he painted “The Kiss,” he was also beating his beautiful wife. He beat her with one hand and painted with the other. He got two sad blisters on his right palm from this. His wife sometimes slowly pulled up the roots to his favorite willows and cut them, […]

Breath Me, Light

Behind Perfume, Only Solitude Ink will come. Lamp lung breathes light at the edge of an idea. The edge an idea, also the door of the room that silence opens. The pen sighs, a lens for the shut-in light. Breathe me, light. Have the idea to have me. –Liz Waldner I was introduced to Waldner’s […]

Somewhere a Nation Moves

Rehearsals for the New Order The courthouse is empty now ablaze with holly, wreathed and ribboned for the season, standing firm against a thrill of breezes, the grinding arcs of stars, grackles crazed and dizzying the turret, the drunken hair of winter gardens at its feet, while inside great mahogany walls, no judge presides, no […]

Poetry Tracking

How much can you know about a movie, a book, a poem from a snippet, be it a trailer, the first page, the first few lines? Joan Houlihan in Contemporary Poetry Review makes the case that the quality of a poet’s work can be determined with some accuracy by “previewing” a poem’s first few lines. […]

Warming Up to the Hum

John Markoff, technology journalist at the New York Times, invited Gary Snyder to write about technology, in this case his Macintosh computer. Says Markoff, “Mr. Snyder might not seem the best person to ask to reflect on the milestones of the digital age. He is 79 and lives in the Sierra foothills in Northern California…Word […]