New Poetry with Audio!
Donald Revell
Stephen Burt
Paul Hoover
Jonah Winter
Cathy Wagner
Reginald Shepherd
Nin Andrews
Sophia Kartsonis
Sandra Miller
Joshua Harmon
Devin Johnston
Chuck Zerby
Sara Henning
Ognjen Smiljanic
Lance Phillips
Peter Drake
Kathleen Byrne
Ernest Hilbert
Garth Greenwell
Marc McKee
Criticism
Brian Henry on Kinsella
Gabriel Welsch on Northrop
Gabriel Welsch on Smith
Cecily Iddings on Ruefle
Christopher McDermott on Wenderoth
Garth Greenwell’s poems have appeared in Pleiades,
Beloit Poetry Journal, Goodfoot and Margie, and were awarded the
2000 Grolier Prize and the 2001 Rella Lossy Award. The recipient of a
Mellon Fellowship, he will begin graduate studies in English at Harvard
University this fall.
Ekstasis
It is like
a severing of grace the body
as it
consumes itself
in
orgasm
that the self might be stepped out of into—
I have
never found it true the dream
of a little
death, the stay
of
thought the unbearable made
bearable
through
some brief ministry of joy
Learning
from men at
lines of urinals the technologies
of
silence only
the
slightest tensing in the flesh as sign
ecstacy not
translation
but the bearing-up of body as against
a force it
will be seiged by but
not
broken Christ
I would
be broken—
Finding his
genitals offended him Origen tore
them out
and of his
body made
no
body
Whoever will
drink from my mouth
will
become like me I beseech thee Be
transformed—
Askesis
A lavish
denial: Blinded, longing to be made use
accepting
without regard to preference or
want the
food he’s offered, or
offered as
I like it when it feels like I’m
nothing but
a hole—
Only when
forced to bear what having
chosen it
cannot
unchoose only bound only
brought to
an edge past which it knows is
nothing and
finding past it
nothing can it be said of the soul
it
worships
To have a commandment, and to be
devoted
to it—
As in these
least honored acts by which
one finds
in oneself
an
ocean
Like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea—
When a man
hath done, then he beginneth
Portrait With Hood and Bindings
semper vagi
et numquam stabiles
Hooded—his
face two leather coins, a slit
for a
mouth—he hangs, our man,
in his
hammock of black wire. Or not quite
hammock; rather
net, what one
is caught
by, dragonfly
or fish,
however willingly made prey
still
tangled. In the third book
of his Tristia,
Ovid, raging against those Romans
who mock
the poems he sends as emissaries
from his
exile, tells the story of Perillus,
the
Athenian artisan who thought to flatter
the tyrant
Phalaris with a gift, fashioning
a golden
calf in which to place a man, whose cries,
as a fire
was lit beneath, as the man, as here,
was turned,
would sound
by means of
its maker’s genius as
the lowing
of a bull. Thrilled, Phalaris
ordered the
contraption immediately tested,
Perillus
placed, immediately, inside—
No
fairer statute than that
which condemns the
artificer of death
to
perish by his art,
says Ovid, affirming
even the
cruelest tyranny against
the misuse
of great craft. Thrice-backed,
taken at
once from both ends from which
a man may
be taken, he cries, yes, neither
with
rapture nor distress, as something
as yet
unlearned of language conceivably
might
cry—what might be words, if we
could hear
them, translated by means
of the
flesh he is forced to give way to to
strange
moan. What seems at first like oil
is not; is,
rather, leather formed so closely
to the
contours of his skin it might be
skin, though
synthetic, though clearly,
when
touched, not skin, leather
interrupted
by apertures for genitals, anus,
lips—for
what might be imagined an instrument
to
another’s pleasure. Monastic
abandon:
offered, blindly, to whomever
is near
enough
to want
him; allowing whomever
is near
enough
to want him
to
enter. Benedict, in his Rule, rails
against
those monks of the fourth kind,
restless, servants
to the seduction of their own
will and
appetites, whose
will and appetites
preclude
the proper dedication
to a single
house, a single father, trading instead
one abbot,
as he irritates, for
another. Semper vagi et numquam
stabiles:
Always wandering and never
still, having forfeited that stability
which is a
life devoted
to
devotion. Having willed
only to
offer as sacrifice
his will,
having acknowledged consent
to be the
spurious token of freedom granted
a soul still
bound, the leather-sheathed man hangs
in his
hammock of black wire, certain
that to
allow devotion an object, to think
of God, of
Beloved, as more than ciphers
into which
our lives are poured, is to
cheapen
them. Perillus, trapped, despised
himself
for having
tooled the very furnace in which he lost
this
language that is our only certainty
we are not
beasts, however often
we might
seem them. As he, prone, seemed them,
his body
obscured in gold, his cries
a cruel
amusement that once begun begins
to
wear. After they have gone, when the man
is alone in
the room
the center
of which contains
a hammock of
black wire
the center
of which contains
a
man—wounded not
as Perillus
was wounded; wounded rather
in that way
in which brokenness
points
toward what is whole—the man
makes no
sound, no motion
that might
convey desire to be lifted, to be
removed
from the suit in which he sweats,
in which
he, almost, cannot breathe. Conversion,
the violent
turning-away-from
which is
the soul hoping to be made
still, must
be accompanied
by great
turmoil—the greater the turmoil,
the
greater, after, the content—
Not
greater. Not content. Rather
relinquishment,
that voiding
of the self
into the self which is, finally,
stabilitas, which is, finally, the turning
of the soul
towards that which offers it
the
greatest pain, towards that
which offers
it, in turn, the greatest
joy. Through the door by which they left the man
the men
return. Or different
men,
shuttling from devotion
to
devotion, who take him, again
and again,
and are still body, as he, still,
is body,
however consummate
his praise,
however certain he is
that it is
this motionful stillness
in which
God is made. Only
the
slightest murmur
as they
enter. Only
the
slightest murmur
as they
leave.
