Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Bethlehem You come home to be counted but no room is to be had at a cost you can afford, having silenced the lathe and stilled the loom, paying the hours with your heart toward a vast accumulating sense of doom that counts the certain end its own reward. The journey stops, not in Jerusalem, but backward, dirty, crowded Bethlehem. Go into this unwholesome stable where, before the beastly eye picks out its blank, a stench of piss has stenciled in the air muscular curve, bold stroke, animal flank; hands, filling in detail of flesh, declare the body a deposit and a bank, care less what cock has shafted home what ass, mad with desire and mad with disease. The kings, they come with their gold offering,            to bless the body’s lust with frankincense, and bitter myrrh the body’s lingering. The shepherds stand astonished by presence. And you, unkept, soon to be undone, sing of the swift massacre of innocence, ...

Scottish poet Rob Mackenzie reviews EQUAL TO THE EARTH: "Koh's formalism serves the poems rather than the other way round. They are extremely well-written, moving, pointed and refreshingly unfashionable...." Nice to be read and compared with George Szirtes' latest book. I knew Rob through the online poetry workshop PFFA. As a poet he is always innovative and yet principled. As a critter he balances judgment with generosity. His first full-length collection of poetry The Opposite of Cabbage was recently reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement . I conducted an email interview with him on his book.

Am I the only one to hate Tom Ford's directorial debut "A Single Man"? I just read the imdb user reviews and they all lapped up the movie. The same things they loved--the parade of well-cut suits, the Kennedy-era authentic details, the cold detachment of the camera--repulsed me. Based on the Christopher Isherwood novel, the film is about a man's grief after the death of his lover. Colin Firth, who plays English professor George, goes through the motions of a day at the end of which he plans to kill himself. Firth looks uncomfortable in the picture, as uncomfortable as the British expatriate in  in his perfect Californian suburban house his character is. Julianne Moore has a wonderful turn as Charley, fading beauty, divorced and hopelessly in love with George, and nearly steals the show from Firth's grief. I guess I don't believe in George's mourning for Jim (the handsome Matthew Goode). There is insufficient irony between his grief and the material perfe...

Saw the Radio City Christmas Spectacular yesterday afternoon with my sister, brother-in-law and two nieces, H who is five, and L who is one. The show was not as enjoyable as I hoped. The Scenes, as they were called, were lavish, but not very imaginative. That left the dancing, by the Rockettes. I thought the choreography was so-so, the range of emotions limited, and when the famous precision was less than precise, what was left? This sounds more disappointing than I actually felt, sitting in that grand theater, with its scalloped proscenium stage. Both H and L were captivated throughout. I thought H showed some taste when she said her favorite scene was the first, the one with the Rockettes dancing as reindeer, and pulling Santa's sleigh. It was fresh and fun then, before it felt like more of the same. Precision and innovation. Watchwords for my ghazal sequence too. Sometimes surface precision can overshadow deep innovation. I think the full sequence of my ghazals will garner ext...

Why do artists paint self-portraits, Cumming asks, and so expose themselves and their art to the accusation of narcissism? Her answer is that self-portraits "make artists present as the embodiment of their art" and they often do so to ask who this person is who is looking back from the mirror. Cumming's book is a series of linked essays, roughly chronological in order, from Jan Van Eyck to Cindy Sherman, focusing mostly on paintings.  A mighty gallery of artists are discussed under rubrics such as "Eyes," "Behind the Scenes," "Mirrors," "Stage Fright," "Loners," "Egotists," "Victims" and "Pioneers." Their inclusion demonstrates that self-portraiture is a main branch, and not a mere off-shoot, of the artistic tradition. Individual essays are devoted to Durer, Rembrandt and Velazquez, and these are the best chapters in a very interesting book. Cumming's discussions of Durer's Christ-li...

"Fever Fragments" is written in response to Idra Novey's "As in Cincinnati," which in turn responds to Kimiko Hahn's "these toys." This extending wire of communication, branching out into others, will be published online next summer as Telephone Project, edited by Jonathan Farmer, poetry editor of At Length . Fever Fragments Can you forget what happened before? —Sappho, “Six Fragments for Atthis” The picture is still so clear to me I cannot imagine you cannot see. The fire’s marks are red, and burn; I turn and turn for your return. Then I see what I did not see: you see a different part in me that when the cold and dark return the fire in you will burn and burn. * All smoke now, the white stars, the stupid wax that crouched too fast under the hooded heat. No stub of toe, no crust of tears, no sex but dissipating wisp, finished, incomplete. * I would make accusation a form of love except it has been done before. * ...

HS made me a copy of the revised text of the Distinguished Guest Lecture delivered at the Larkin Society AGM on 13 June 2009. In the lecture, Marion Shaw discussed Larkin's ambivalence towards Tennyson, how he at once excoriated the Laureate's silliness and envied the poet's, and his period's, "range, the colour, the self-confidence of it all" ( Required Writing , p. 182). Using Bloomian theory in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), a book Shaw describes as "slightly mad," she reads three poems by Larkin as  "corrections" of his poetic predecessor. "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" directly quotes "sweet girl-graduate" from Tennyson's The Princess . The "heavy-headed rose/ Beneath a trellis" also works within a field of Tennysonian reference, in particular that of his early English Idylls, perhaps "The Gardener's Daughter." The narrator of Tennyson's poem is a portrait painter...

JS, EN and I braved the snow last evening to see Robert Frank at the Met. It was strange: I did not like the show of photographs as much as the first time. Many of the photos were really not very interesting, and seemed to be there in "The Americans" for the sake of theme than for their individual aesthetic power. JS said that he has seen many images at Flikr as good as the ones in the show. I guess Frank should get some credit for doing it first. Perhaps I have been influenced by the documentary on Henri Cartier-Bresson called "The Impassioned Eye" (2003). The photos of the French Master wielded great power, as a result of what he called the alignment of the eye, mind and heart. Some photos were more concerned with geometric form, others with emotional mystery, but they were all individually beautiful. I love the images of old Matisse with his birds. History was captured at the liberation of Paris, the death of Gandhi and the Communist takeover of China. This was ...

TLS December 18 & 25 2009 from Frank Whitford's review of  Vincent Van Gogh: The complete letters , edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker: Though self-absorbed, the letters testify to both the uncertainty and single-minded struggle of a painter who suffered, in the beginning at least, from a lack of facility, even from clumsiness. Like Cezanne, Van Gogh had to work hard to achieve anything. Then he discovered how to take strength from his weaknesses. * High-key colors helped him convey his feelings and so influence ours. A key passage about his painting "Interior of a Cafe at Night" (1888) explains how he did this. In my picture . . . I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmospher...

If a poet can be cheerful without being nauseating, Sarah Sarai is she. Her optimism is undergirt by a restless intelligence, a hardheadedness about the world, and a willingness to be vulnerable. She hears happiness in a tenor sax and hipness in Count Basie's Band. Music buoys her sufficiently to dance and sing: There's no foot in the grave, only the dead. Swing time. Bebop. If you need more, I can't help you. (from "The Future Is Happy") Most of her poems, unlike the one I just quoted, are not crowd-pleasers in a poetry reading. They are too dense with cultural, historical and literary references to be understood at one hearing. They are better read and heard in the quiet of one's own room. They are friendly (many of them are dedicated to friends) but not flattering. Sometimes they are too heavy with cultural freight ("In Denzel Washington's Gaze" and "We All Know Things Together"), but at their best their knowingness gives the...

In To Views features a brief interview with me. It may be a fun interview to read. *

This book of gay poetry criticism is divided into two sections: Themes and Variations. Under the rubric of Themes, Woods examines The Male Body, Men of War, and Childless Fathers. In the first, he describes from the literature of men who desire men the specific attractions associated with each year of adolescence. After that fascinating chronology, he explores the three ideal male physiques in Western art, and their correspondence to mythical and historical figures that recur in gay male poetry. The discussion of Orpheus is of great interest. Woods writes: Intact, torn and scattered: such are the three conditions of the body of Orpheus. The first, being the condition, also, of Apollo already dismissed, is negligible. But the second and third bear some relation to the nature of sexual appraisal and activity, insofar as looking at and making love to a person may be deeds of dismemberment. 'The true body is a body broken.' So says Norman O. Brown, before quoting Yeats: 'Noth...

The book begins with a white-hot description of the male body. "Three types of male physiques, " writes Woods, "three distinct ideals, occur in Western art: the adolescent pliancy of Narcissus, Apollo's form but graceful maturity, and the potency of Heracles, tacitly poised on the verge of deterioration." He elaborates: The three physical types correspond with sexual types. The adolescent may be endowed with an indefatigable penis, but is chiefly admired for the delightful promise of his backside. Shakespeare is not interested in his boyfriend's penis (sonnet 20). . . . Heracles is the opposite type, unequivocally phallic. When he lays down his club, he is still heavily armed. His musculature seems designed for the pinning down of loved ones, while the phallus does its work. He and the adolescent, as sexual opposites, together form the perfect couple: Heracles and Hylas, Hadrian and Antinous. Between the two lies the adaptability of Apollo, the single coup...

Gregory Woods is the Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. In A History of Gay Literature , he does not so much as constitute an alternative literary tradition as show the centrality of gay writing (broadly defined) to "mainstream" literature. It is astonishing that so much of what we take as the canon is written by men who loved men. This book then, almost encyclopedic in its scope, is not just for the gay reader who seeks to understand his literary heritage; it is also for the straight reader who wants to discover the sources of his pleasure in this writing. Like other gay critics and anthologists before him, Woods names names. Many of the names are by now familiar, but others--like T. S. Eliot--are not usually discussed in this context. That is one pleasure of this book: the re-orientation of a familiar waste land. Yet other names still attract debate. The chapter on Shakespeare homes in on the interpretation of Sonnet 20, often used by str...

Acts of Faith is the biographical story of a man growing up American, (South) Indian and Muslim. Patel's Ismaili Muslim parents moved from Bombay to the United States in search of a better life, and so Patel grew up between worlds. If the coming-of-age story sounds familiar, Patel enlivens it with well-chosen anecdotes and an interesting cast of characters, including a meeting with the Dalai Lama. The book is also an argument for religious pluralism over what it calls "religious totalitarianism." Its main thesis is that behind religious terrorists, who are almost always young people, are charismatic leaders and established institutions who have reached the youths in a way that mainstream religious organizations have failed to do. While interfaith organizations have existed for a long time, they are dominated by greybeards ad so appear irrelevant to young people. Inspired by heroes in different religious traditions, and by the discovery of diversity within Islam itself, ...

I returned last night from the People of Color Conference with a mixed bag of impressions and one main thought. The impressions first: 1. I do not like the term "People of Color." It implies White is not a color. It assumes too much similarity or solidarity between different ethnicities. It emphasizes racial and ethnic diversity over other kinds of diversity such as gender, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status. It is also not a term with which I can imaginatively identify. 2. John Quinones, an award-winning TV journalist, told the compelling story of his rise from immigrant poverty to mainstream success. The story highlighted the personal qualities of ambition, perseverance and talent. It described racist discrimination but also the advantages afforded by his ethnicity. My impression is that the crucial difference in Quinones lies, not in his circumstances, but in his response to his circumstances. The difference is the mystery of character. 3. It is easier to ta...

I'm off today to Denver, to the three-day People of Color Conference , organized by the National Association of Independent Schools. First time attending the conference, first time in Denver too. The conference program looks packed, so there won't be time for gallivanting around the city. No time for shoot-em-ups. According to wiki, the city is nicknamed the Mile-High City because its official elevation is exactly one mile above sea level. It sits in the bowl of the South Platte River Valley, east of the Front Range of the Rockies. Downtown is just east of the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. Always good to know the names of the running waters nearby. The 105th meridian west of Greenwich runs through Union Station, making it the reference point for the Mountain Time Zone. The zone is two hours behind Eastern Time Zone. Perhaps I will bring back a poem from the wild West. *

I woke up in a strange bedroom, a red plush chair standing from the clutter. I thought I had gone home with someone, and he would walk into his room any moment now. What would he be like? This must be a dream since I was sure I had fallen asleep in my own room. I tried to see my room in that room but the strange room stayed stubbornly. Then it left, and I was bereft.

Leslie Lohman was closed (for Thanksgiving?), and so KM brought me to Eleanor Ettinger Gallery on Spring Street to see an artist he aspires to be. Michael de Brito , 29, paints his Portuguese American family around a dining table, presided over by his Grandma. The paintings are photographic in their ability to capture the social interaction and the bric-a-brac around the table, but they are also wholly paintings in their confident brushstrokes. Here they are, these people who would have looked so familiar if you pass them on the street, but who look so strange--or is the word, fresh--in a painting. The ubiquitous mineral water bottle appears familiar and strange too on the dining table. Traditional technique but novel subjects. Novel not only because contemporary but also culturally particularized. Not culturally theorized but particularized. Not detail instead of theory, but detail as theory. No ideas but in things. And the technique so proudly recalling the Old Masters, for their...

Last night, with LW, I heard Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) for the first time, played by the New York Philharmonic. A native of Switzerland, he studied at the Paris Conservatory and banded with fellow students--Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre, and Louis Durey, with Eric Satie as spiritual godfather--to become known as Les Six. Symphony No. 2 (1941), played by a string orchestra and a lone trumpet. was composed during the Nazi occupation of France, which Honegger refused to leave though he could claim neutrality as a Swiss. The symphony is in three movements. The trumpet comes in at the very end to support the strings in a chorale-like finish. An economy of means, fitting, perhaps, to a wartime symphony. I always fear disappointment when going to a performance of Beethoven's symphonies. Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic are in my head, and no performance will, of course, sound like them. I thought Muti gave an uneven interpretation of the Eroic...

AH, hearing of my breakup, wrote me a loving email of consolation. At the end of the message, he wished for me that I would find "the vocabulary of grief" to express my sadness. To speak, and to speak with all the precision and tact such a situation requires would be a relief. It is beyond me right now. But Auden comes to the rescue this morning. While grading poetry papers, I stumble on this lyric written in March 1936, that I knew but forgot. Dear, though the night is gone, The dream still haunts to-day That brought us to a room, Cavernous, lofty as A railway terminus, And crowded in that gloom Were beds, and we in one In a far corner lay. Our whisper woke no clocks, We kissed and I was glad At everything you did, Indifferent to those Who sat with hostile eyes In pairs on every bed, Arms round each other's necks, Inert and vaguely sad. O but what worm of guilt Or what malignant doubt Am I the victim of; That you then, unabashed, Did what I never...

Elizabeth Harrington asked Jackie Sheeler and me to read with her last night, and the reading at Cornelia Street Cafe was seamed with gold. Without prior consultation, all three of us read poems about family. Perhaps with Thanksgiving in our minds, we read about childhood, sickness, loneliness and loss. Jackie's poems deployed detail and imagery in a most telling way. Her assured performance elicited every response from the audience the poems aimed for. Betsy's reading voice was quieter, and perhaps more hesitant, but her poems came out of the deep pit of self. I read mostly new poems, about my grandfather, my father and TH, and did not quite find my groove. Afterwards EN pointed out perceptively why. I was influenced by Jackie's accomplished reading, and so semi-consciously tried to read like her to get the same audience response she did, although my poems are built differently. EN and I thought it was my competitive streak showing up again. But this morning I think it h...

Access Theater was not easy to get to. Located south of Canal Street, and not in the usual theater neighborhoods, it perched at the top of eight flights of steps. You might also mistake the other small theater on the same floor for it, as I did, since there were no signs except for xeroxed posters of Fiasco Theater's production of Cymbeline . But access is not just a matter of geography, of course; it is also emotion and physicality. The last two Fiasco Theater had in spades in their exhilarating performance. No fancy stage sets or props to hide behind.  Just 6 actors and a trunk. With tremendous joyful energy, they pumped Shakespeare's late romance for all its poetry, comedy, melodrama and, yes, tragedy. The scene in which Belaria and the boys mourned over the supposedly dead Imogen was heart-breaking. The pathos turned abruptly, magically, into silliness when Imogen revived and touched the headless Cloten. Instead of smoothing out the play's mixture of genres, this prod...

In Cha , Moira Moody reviews Equal to the Earth , alongside Two Baby Hands , another book of poems by another Singaporean with the same last name. Fortunately the review makes no cutesy pun. It sees the two books' very different aesthetics but finally, unfortunately, shies away from any evaluation, settling for the anodyne conclusion that "Their volumes are equally promising and rigorous in the different directions they take, and together only suggest that the country's poetic climate is not easily reduced." For a very different judgment of Gilbert Koh's Two Baby Hands , read Nicholas Liu's review in QLRS. Liu enjoys wielding the knife a little too much, I think, but his opinion is incisive and well-supported. Moody, on the other hand, has doubts about my style but does not quite come out to say them. The doubts are more or less consciously expressed in her choice of words. She refers, for example, to my use of "the rigidity of form" to contain s...

Toward a psychology of the artist . If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this" above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy. Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong affects; the frenzy of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the frenzy of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction; the frenzy under certain meteorological influences, as for example the frenzy of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the frenzy of will, the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will. What is essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to accept fr...

Yesterday I read at Peter Chelnik's reading series, together with Susan Maurer and Patricia Carragon. The reading took place in the 140-seat Chernuchin Theater, one of four performance spaces in the American Theater of Actors. Since there were about 20 of us altogether, the raised seating looked rather forlorn, but the poetry and the attention more than made up for the numbers. Both Susan and Patricia read some really interesting pieces, and the open-mic was one of the best that I have ever heard. I read a poem from each section of ETTE: "Hungry Ghosts," "Florida," "Blowjob," "Brother" and "Montauk." I sold two books, one to EN who turned up despite a cold. JF also came, and the three of us had dinner afterwards at the Cosmic Diner, and chatted about family, heritage and intellectuality. EN told a wonderful tale about the vent that connected his parents' house to his grandparents'. JF came back at him with a mystery story: t...

The Asian American Writers' Workshop expanded its annual awards ceremony into a literary festival. The one-day event took place yesterday at the Powerhouse Arena, in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Two separate readings took place at every hour from 11 AM to 6 PM. I attended the 4 PM session "Sex and the Cities: Stories of Love & the Metropolis" with readings by Hari Kunzru, Monique Truong and Mort Baharloo. From where we sat we could hear the other reading, and so it was hard to concentrate, especially during the mic-wrecked question-and-answer that followed. The day ended with a reading by Jhumpa Lahiri, the main reason why six students, who studied her work last year, came with me. This was my third time hearing her read, and she continued to wow me with her thoughtful poise. When someone from the audience asked an obnoxious question, she declined firmly but gracefully to give an answer. In her replies to her interviewer, she did not try to say more than she meant. One answer s...

I took a year long manuscript course with Marie at 92Y last year. In class she would ask us to describe a workshopped poem instead of judging it immediately, and we discovered that description is also a form of judgment, but keener-eyed. Last Thursday, the New School Writing program, where Marie teaches, and Pen American Center sponsored an evening's tribute to her. It also launched her new book, with the wonderful title, Easy . The large Tishman auditorium was less than half filled. I felt a little sad about that. She has won all kinds of awards but I've always felt that she is in danger of being under-appreciated. The story most often told of her life is that of a poet who published a first book when young and then her second thirty years later. In that interval of apparent silence, she was raising seven children and spending a few minutes each day writing. The moral for young poets, which a number of readers that night rehearsed, is not to rush into publication. It is a n...

The Old Wallet he cannot see from the surface of a wealth he cannot keep --Eavan Boland, “Making Money” Pocket of pockets, my old wallet keeps the likenesses of long dead Presidents, credit card, coins, stamps, memberships, but not a photograph of love. My reason? I thought that the mind is a fitter place for images of illimitable grace. The old wallet will do for society but soul resides not in skin but in me. Yet now I see the mind exchanges love so easily for venom and forgets the daily accumulation of its debts and bad seasons it is a veteran of. So I am asking for a photograph, Love, on love’s behalf.— *

A Whole History In the morning they were both found dead      Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. --Eavan Boland, “Quarantine” The floor is cold with the coming winter.      I pull on white socks and sit down before the blackout window to think about our separation closing in. We have a history longer than the two years      that fitted like a shirt. You learned a long time ago to enjoy ironing. I always had someone ironing shirts for me. But we go further back than birth, to furtive       park encounters, coded glances, tapping on bathroom walls, ways of staying warm and white in winter. Yesterday a young friend said it’s wrong      to expose children to a gay wedding. The chill hit me again. Rage spread like blood over my clean shirt. I cannot wash it off. You are no longer willing.      In the closet the shirt, part remi...

Wendell Ricketts, the editor of this online publication , calls for more fiction, essays, poems, memoirs by (for and about) working class queers. Read the villanelle by Colm Toibin and Maura Dooley. Submit, submit.

Attribution I speak with the forked tongue of colony. --Eavan Boland, “The Mother Tongue” My grandfather said life was better under the British. He was a man who begrudged his words but he did say this. I was born after the British left. They left an alphabet book in my house, the same one they left at school. I was good in English. I was the only one in class who knew “bedridden” does not mean lazy. I was so good in English they sent me to England where I proved my grandfather right until I was almost sent down for plagiarism I knew was wrong and did not know was wrong, since where I came from everyone plagiarized. I learned to attribute everything I wrote. It is not easy. Sometimes I cannot find out who first wrote the words I wrote. Sometimes I think I wrote the words I wrote with such delight. Often the words I write have confusing origins and none can tell what belongs to the British, my grandfather or me. *

What the River Says The body is a source. Nothing more. --Eavan Boland, “Anna Liffey” I too compare my life frequently to a river, small hidden beginning, final dissolution, body charged with a name but always changing. It is a place to live by, to keep a few chickens or raise a city famous for its graceful bridges, if one cares for good eating or reaching across. On mornings when the rear courtyard is stony, how enjoyable to walk to the water and hear its gossip about the young lovers parting upriver. The annual swelling is a power for great evil but also a pregnancy. It carries boats and people. For explorers, there is a chance of a waterfall. Sinners, those hybrid creatures, like centaurs, may drive their reluctant horses into the flood and experience total absolution in an instant. So, if my body is a river, I won’t dismiss it as a source and nothing more. It is a source of my voice but it is also my voice: that is what the river says on its way to the ...

The Scriptures But I was Ceres then and I knew winter was in store for every leaf --Eavan Boland, “Pomegranates” Because my father has no story to bequeath his son, I make up stories to live by. I am the Dragon Prince who falls into forbidden love and so is banished from the palace of the sea. On days when the sun brandishes its magic swords I journey to the West as wily Monkey God to fetch the Scriptures, fighting demons on the way. From my right ear I draw my tiny magic pole and whip the fox spirit with a springy cane or else, expanding the prod to a temple pillar, crush a snake demon with the majesty of heaven. How powerful I feel then, how abject my foes, how full of light the rounded world, a bursting peach, until the ring my father set around my head tightens and digs into my flesh, my skull. I roll and tumble through the seven worlds but not the ring. All of my reach contracts into a burning hole. I cry, “Mercy!” and hear the fox squeal in my ears, and hi...

One Humor From where I stand the sea is just a rumour. --Eavan Boland, “Our Origins Are in the Sea” In medieval theories of medicine, one humor escaped the logic of the lovely charts. From where I stand the sea is just a rumor. I love the way the year cycles into summer, the sun characteristic as the parts, in medieval theories of medicine, of humor. But from the times, closely watched, swells a tumor and the tide of recrimination starts. From where I stand the sea is just a rumor. Damn the homosexual. Blame the consumer. Fault the degeneration of the arts or medieval theories of medicine. Ill humor. Fear grows like barnacles on baby boomers while the young sails resent the ancient farts. From where I stand the sea is just a rumor. We hold to different memories of summer as yellow bile possess our yellow hearts. In medieval theories of medicine, one humor, from where I stand to see, was just a rumor. *

This may be my favorite Almodovar so far. "Live Flesh" may not be as haunting as "Talk to Her" or as moving as "Volver" but it is an idea perfectly executed. No self-indulgent bulges nor forced shortcuts, it is as well-proportioned as its dishy lead Victor Plaza (Liberto Rabal). Love and its obsessions play out with formal symmetry among two married couples and an outsider. Elena (the very beautiful Francesca Neri) and David (Javier Bardem) are married, but Victor loves Elena. Sancho (Jose Sancho) and Clara (Angela Molina) are married, but David had an affair with Clara, and she has now fallen for Victor. After learning of David's affair with Clara, Elena made love to Victor. David wants to use Sancho to kill Victor, but finds out, from Victor, that Sancho, having found out about David's affair with Clara, fired the gun in Victor's hand at David and crippled him. David goes ahead to tell Sancho of Clara's affair with Victor. When Sancho t...

The Rooms I Move In the bay windbreak, the laburnum hang fire, feel the ache of things ending in the jasmine darkening early --Eavan Boland, “The Rooms of Other Women Poets” I have moved in the rooms of other women poets and, seeing African violets, checked if they needed water, careful not to disturb the stolen time in the chairs, the swivel leather seat, the one with a high cane back. The desks, if there was one, were bright with circumstance cast by an Anglepoise lamp, crooked, articulate. The window might look out on an old monastery but the door opened its ear to a cry or a creak. Such rooms I moved in when I move between the men thick with desire they thrust into another’s hand, before your face I offer the flower of my mouth, red in the red light but also out of the red light, a wild hibiscus impossible to label chaste if my red mouth is not so chastened by my need. *

TLS October 30 2009 from Christopher Reid's review of Helen Carr's The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and the Imagists : . . . it does seem that, for Pound, authenticity of voice could only, or most reliably, be attained through translation or adaptation. Even those poems of his that might have come about solely as expositions of the pure Imagist manner--miniature masterpieces like "In a Station of the Metro" and "The Garden"--wear an air of pastiche, as if behind each of them lay some imagined original in a foreign tongue, most likely Japanese or French. Reid's comment on Pound as pastiche helped me understand an editor's comment on the ghazals I submitted. He said, "They read like the most exquisite parodies of Pound translations from Chinese and Japanese, yet they also do work as original poems do." The slipperiness of imitation, translation and parodies! I did not write the ghazals as parodies, exquisite or not, but now ...

The full title of the book is American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman , and the book is as ambitious as its title sounds. It questions the bias of American literary criticism towards the novel and posits that poetry, elegy in particular, provides a powerful frame through which to view literary transactions with cultural transformations. Elegy had from ancient times been highly self-conscious of its mixture of precedent, transmission and invention. In the American Revolutionary and early national periods, elegy was "at once the most elite and demotic of mourning genres," Cavitch argues. It involved all reasonably literate people, as readers and writers; it was available to black writers who were still slaves. To give shape to the vast mass of material, Cavitch focuses on a representative elegist or two for each period, while not neglecting other significant figures. To represent the Puritans, he selects Annis Stockton who memorialized her husband ...

Yet another Antigone , this one adapted for our times. Written by Jocelyn Clarke, directed by Anne Bogart, created and performed by SITI Company, this Antigone protests the American invasion of Iraq and rejects facile and sinister attempts at reconciling the real divisions in American society. It looks steadily, compassionately, at war's casualties, as the fighting proceeds street by street in the Theban war against Argos. Creon suspends civil rights in the name of state security, and puts the protesting Theban elders under house arrest. Pressed again and again to marry Haemon for the sake of national unity, Antigone refuses to compromise on her beliefs, though she loves her childhood friend. The political message is clear in this production, but it is also artful. One aspect of its artfulness lies in its use of the Chorus. To counterbalance the play's contemporary allusions, the Chorus tells the story of the past. In captivating installments, he explains how Zeus's capt...

The sixth issue of Los Angeles Review , published by Ren Hen Press, is out. My poem "What We Call Vegetables" is in it, along with contributions by  Michael Czyzniejewski, Lydia Davis, Barry Graham, Naseem Rakha, Deborah Ager, Alex Lemon and Steven Almond. Essays. Fiction. Poetry. Reviews. Get your copy.

Leo Macias, played by a vivifying Marisa Paredes, cannot accept her marriage is dead. Unable to write the romance novels she churned out under the pseudonym Amanda Gris, she takes a job as a book reviewer with newspaperman Angel (Juan Echanove). Not knowing she is Gris, Angel assigns her to review her own book. He also falls in love with her but she cannot return his love, since she still hopes her husband would return to her. When her husband Paco (Imanol Arias) kills all hope, she is so depressed that she attempts suicide, and then leaves Madrid with her mother to return to the latter's village. Weaving with the village women, Leo may recuperate but her desire for life is only rekindled when she finds out that her anti-romantic novel she trashed helped to fund a flamenco dance production put up by the son of her cook. So art saves her finally, saves her for life. A comment on imdb credited this film with Almodover's turn from formless farces to rich melodramas. The Flower o...

TLS October 23 2009 I had not read Laura Cumming's book A Face to the World  when I wrote my poem "Seven Studies for a Self-Portrait." Reading Elizabeth Lowry's review of the book, I am amazed by the connections and coincidences between Cumming's Durer and mine . The divine in the human is exactly the theme not only of the Durer study of my "Seven Studies," but also of my next book, to be titled the same as its opening sequence. The book will begin with the Christ-like Durer, and end with a ghazal sequence, in which the last ghazal compares me to God: "Jee, the unlikely initial for God." According to Cumming, Durer also painted his self-portrait based on his trademark initial, A. The initial A also begins and ends a sequence in my book called "I Am My Names," in which A stands for Anonymous. Furthermore, Lowry points out that Durer's finger in the self-portrait says, "Ecce Homo." That is, of course, also Nietzsche...