“For a Coming Extinction” (W.S. Merwin)
For a Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were [...]
Animal Cruelty
In a comment to the previous post, Chris Robinson makes reference to a poem from my book Magical Thinking. We bear a special responsibility, greater perhaps than the responsibility we bear toward each other, to care for animals. Whichever philosopher said that we reveal our character through our treatment of those weaker than ourselves was [...]
Postcard Collage Project
I’ve started a project to send handmade postcards to poets & artists I know around the country, with comments about poetry & poetics. You can see the very beginnings of the project by clicking the project link in the Sharp Sand header. Thumbnails link to somewhat larger images.
A Little Poem During a Cold Spring
Poetics
Here is the world.
It’s a cold place &
There’s not much
you can do with it–
a little shaping or
arranging around
the edges. Pattern
emerges through
accretion of detail.
Denote. Until light
clobbers you hard
in the face, a salt
wave stirred full
of sand & knocks
you off your feet
& nearly drowns
you in the actual.
The world is heavy
it turns out. Hard
with denotations.
You come up sput-
tering. At [...]
$100,000 Lineation
I saw recently that Tom Sleigh’s new book of poems, Space Walk had won the Kingsley Tufts Award in poetry — the richest prize this side of a MacArthur — so I ordered the book immediately from Amazon, thinking that I too might be able to Make Big Money In Poetry. Actually, it’s an intelligent [...]
William Carlos Williams in 1928
I’ve always loved these lines from WCW’s “Descent of Winter,” which is a kind of daybook consisting of poems & sections of prose. Williams, a pediatrician, was also an acute observer of old age. Beyond that, I love the audacity of the shift between the two stanzas, leaving the reader to make the connections between [...]
In Which Mark Jarman Reveals My Secret Fascist Sympathies on Alfred Corn’s Weblog
You can read the exchange here. What I find interesting is the way culturally conservative American poets have been scrambling away from movement formalism over the last few years, acting as if the New Formalism didn’t exist, as if the name itself, in Corn’s formulation, was “a misnomer.” Mark Jarman left a comment correcting Alfred [...]
Damning with (Very) Faint Praise
James Longenbach takes down the New Formalists via his review of Mary Jo Salter’s new book. Longenbach’s review in the NY Times rightly says that the wars between the New Formalists & the Language Poets now “. . . feel dated, part of the niggling history of taste rather than the grand history of art.” [...]
(Poetic) Cultural Capital
So Paul Hoover sails off to Vietnam for two weeks, meets with a few writers, makes connections, comes home & publishes an anthology, Black Dog, Black Night, of 20th century Vietnamese poetry. I shopped around a similar book in 2001 when I returned from a year in Vietnam — my fifth trip to the country [...]
Project Challenge: Week 5
Note: I started this last week, after my run of Saturday mornings with the high school students had concluded. On the last day, I didn’t try to introduce new material; instead, I tried to consolidate some of the fundamentals I had worked on in the previous weeks: concrete language, drawing playfully on the unconscious, listening [...]
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