Excerpts From Spring 2006 / Contributors From Spring 2006

Vol. XXXVI, No. 1

Natania Rosenfeld

Bird Visitations

I was a crow caught in a pot. They were going to cook me, to make crow stew. I flapped my wings, clang-clang, and the lid flew off the pot. “But we were going to eat you, Crow!” they said. “Eat another crow, not me,” I squawked. “I’ll have nothing to do with your ceremonies.” They watched me fly through the back door, their arms hanging at their sides.

*

“What can I do?” he said. “Eat crow,” I said. We went out, shot a crow, came home, steamed it in an inch of water. “I’m going to watch,” I said. First he pulled the feathers out and licked each quill, setting it aside on a plate. Then he ate the whole, stringy crow. He was making faces the entire time, but I didn’t let him stop. Finally, he finished the crow, belched. “Satisfied?” he said. “No,” I said, and flew out the window.

*

Two birds were clinging to my shoulder, a finch and a parakeet. Every so often, they would deflate and I’d have to revive them with food. I gave birth and my baby turned into a parakeet the size of a thumb. I forgot to feed it and it withered like a dry condom.

I saw a shining, dark blue bird on the grass, unable to move. I bent and saw its neck was choked in a band, the head turned wrong way around. I put my hands around the bird and was able to pick her up and unwrap the noose. Instantly, her head turned around the right way and grew normal-sized, and she flew free.

To read more, click here (PDF).

Eamon Grennan

A Thrush by Utamaro

Although it looks the picture of perfect balance, and although I’d imagined nothing could be steadier (yellow legs stapled to the softer yellow of a bamboo stake) and envied its way, at once solid and light, of being in the world, in fact the bird is only in the picture for its name—komedori—which means to be unbearably troubled. But then I see that what I was really admiring is the way its tenacious grip on things is sustained in spite of how the world of broken stake and bursting chrysanthemum blossom is going to bits around it, its unbearable trouble being borne and lived inside as the creature must live inside its own name, remaining upright against the odds and holding on to the long bamboo as though it were a flute, whose music might match the thrush’s own wood­notes, songs raised over wreckage when the momentary dust has settled.

Jason Zuzga

Amarillo Ramp [Excerpt]

Amarillo, Texas, is the birthplace of Cyd Charisse, the site of the Frying Pan Ranch (the first ranch on earth to be enclosed by barbed wire), the home of the headquarters of the American Quarter Horse Association, and the site of earthworks sculptor Robert Smithson’s death-by-plane-crash as he surveyed the loca-tion by air, working on what would be his last piece.

Amarillo Ramp lies twenty-six miles north of Amarillo, Texas, in a playa, Tecovas Lake. The lake was created for irrigation purposes by the construction of an earthen dam at one end of a canyon and is dry for most of the year. The ramp itself is 3,676 feet above sea level at its base, rising fourteen feet above the ground as it curves, forming an incomplete circle with a diameter of 150 feet.

Robert Smithson was killed by his own art in a catastrophic ac-cident as he surveyed the area where he had marked, on the ground, by hand, the boundaries of the ramp. Smithson wrote of vast time, of ruins and geology, of the de facto monuments of our civilization, but in the moment of crash he experienced instant entropy. He was snapped out of history into geology, shot across the infinite plain of the instant where he as a mind ceased moving forward along the time axis.

All of the art criticism surrounding the art hero Smithson says, at most, that “the pilot and photographer also died.” The absence of their names from all literature about Smithson has struck me as a hole. None of Smithson’s major works could have been created by one man alone, yet in his essay, “Mirror Travels in the Yucatan,” he himself omitted the other people with him on his travels. In part, this essay is a recovery mission, however impossible. These names have been erased from the picture and so the earthwork stands alone in majesty. The humans smashed away, the catastrophic instant effaced.

I have read Smithson’s writings. I have made the pilgrimage to the recently unsubmerged Spiral Jetty, walking, as if pacing out a medieval labyrinth on the floor of a cathedral, the salt-encrusted boulders in the blizzard-like glare of the Great Salt Lake’s as-of-now receding shore. The Spiral Jetty is an ongoing collaboration between Smithson and the earth which doesn’t care, which moves on. I visited Smithson’s three mounds of matter (broken glass, sand, dirt) with embedded mirrors in the new DIA museum in Beacon, New York. Soon enough, I’ll go to Los Angeles to see the Smithson retrospective just opened last Friday (which has since opened and closed at the Whitney).

To read more, click here (PDF).

Susan Goslee

"At Fourteen in Rome . . ."

At fourteen in Rome from Tennessee, I practiced
the twist and heavy droop of grapes.
In line for dinner, I slid, a steady weight, to the floor.
Yes, readers, you could say: dehydration, August, unconscious
      only for a moment.
But I say: swoon,
drafting my practice of desire,
flinging myself into flowery glades.
After all, we had walked that day
from the center of the city
to the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla and back.
Oh, I was surely white as a sheet.
As treatment: dinner, aqua minerale, Coca-Cola,
and then to the gelataria across the square.
All the fuss was sweet fruit to my taste.

The shop served rose.
I had not known it was a flavor.
I had allowed only a flower, a color, a scent.
The world was breaking open.
My heart ran, unbound, a hart across the steps of my ribs.
I looked to see if the shop served cedar or fir.

In San Terenzo, early in Mary Shelley’s fifth pregnancy,
little red foxes ran down her legs.
There would have been so much blood that I cannot see it
though my mind returns to skirt its far spread edges.
Too many poems describe such stains as a rose—a wide, new
      bloom on the sheets.
This is ridiculous. 
Its petals have limits.
Its thorns do no more than what you can lick off the tip of your
      finger. 
Kudzu, maybe.
A single tendril, but then in a moment it has covered the Subaru
      Justy on blocks, smothered
the hillside, killed everything it covered,
and made no wine.

The doctor was delayed.
Her friends tried vinegar massages, brandy, and eau de cologne.
Percy demanded ice.
The others did not believe, but he lifted Mary up
and placed her in a tub of it
till she was but the frost of heaven.
Her journal says he used the ice unsparingly;
that he was the only one who saved her,
without mercy, without restraint.

Mary and Percy Shelley weren’t even getting along,
but still kept getting pregnant. 
That can happen.
We want all kinds of things.

So, readers, can you tell? Can you guess?
Marry me.
Yes, may this be my shotgun honeymoon on the Continent.
My blood, my busy bee, thick as if from a broken honeycomb.
I will dangle, a damsel in distress. 
I will offer no helpful tightening, no resistance.
I want to feel the lift, the heave.
I will cover myself in red as with a garment.
I will stretch my insides out, unhide my heavens.
I do not want to be spared.
Did they not love this lily among thorns?

Did they not love the apple tree among the trees of the wood,
the wood for burning?
I want to be spoiled, to be ruined.
Did it not bear its fruit? Its fine taste? Its red fire?

CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME XXXVi, NO. 1, Spring 2006

Eugénio de Andrade was Portugal’s best-loved contemporary poet. He published twenty-seven volumes of poetry and has been translated into over twenty languages. His most recent collection in English, translated by Alexis Levitin, is Forbidden Words, available from New Directions.

Edward Bartók-Baratta has published poems recently in African- American Review, BOMB, Ploughshares, The Boston Review, Den-ver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Northamp­ton, Mass-achusetts.

Marianne Boruch’s fifth collection, Poems: New and Selected, was published in 2004, and her second book of essays on poetry, In the Blue Pharmacy, was released last year. She teaches in the M.F.A. program at Purdue University.

Carol Burbank is a poet, playwright, writing coach, teacher, and Senior Fellow at the Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland. She is working on a series of poems exploring the elemental or primal archetypes that fuel our deepest sense of self and community.

Teresa Cader is the author of Guests, which won the Norma Farber First Book Award and The Journal Award from Ohio State Univer­sity Press. Her second book is The Paper Wasp. She lives in Lexing­ton, Massachusetts, and teaches in Lesley University’s M.F.A. Program.

Gerald Chapple teaches at McMaster University in Ontario. His translations of Günter Kunert have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Agni, and other journals, and his translation of Barbara Frischmuth’s Chasing After the Wind: Four Stories was given a translation award by the Austrian government.

Mary Crow has published translations of books by Roberto Juar-roz, Jorge Teillier, and Olga Orozco, and she edited Woman Who Has Sprouted Wings: Poems by Contemporary Latin American Women Poets. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

John Crutchfield is a playwright, poet, and performer based in his native North Carolina mountains. Founder and artistic director of Jynormous Theatre Company, he also teaches literature and creative writing at Appalachian State University and edits its poetry journal, Cold Mountain Review.

D.W. Cunningham pays the rent by writing about medical re-search. He lives in Maryland and has published poems in journals including Poetry, Hubbub, and, previously, Seneca Review.

Jim Daniels’ most recent book is Street, a collection of poems along with the photos of Charlee Brodsky. Dumpster, an indepen-dent film he wrote and produced, will appear in 2006. He is the Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Mell­on University where he directs the creative writing program.

Christopher Dombrowski’s poems have appeared in Crazy­horse, Green Mountains Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals, and are forthcoming in The Autumn House Anthology of American Poems and Prayers. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

Lauren Fanelli received an M.F.A. in poetry from American Uni-versity, where she served as editor-in-chief for Folio. Her work has appeared in such journals as The New York Quarterly, Phoebe, and Barrow Street. She now works at a literary agency in New York City.

Susan Goslee received an M.F.A. from the University of Alabama and is now in the Ph.D. program in creative writing at the University of Utah. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Diagram, Barrow Street, Sonora Review, Northwest Review and Gulf Coast.

Eamon Grennan, originally from Dublin, Ireland, has taught for many years at Vassar College. His most recent poetry collections are Still Life with Waterfall, which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and The Quick of It. Oxford University Press recently published his translation (with Rachel Kitzinger) of Oedipus at Colonus.

Megan Grumbling received the 2004 Robert Frost Award, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Passages North, and The MacGuffin. She is the author and printer of the chap-book To and from Deepening, and works as a theater critic in Portland, Maine.

Daniel Gutstein has published poetry and fiction widely. His first book, Counting Station, a mixed-genre collection, is forthcoming from Edge Books. He teaches at George Washington Uni-versity.

Ed Haworth Hoeppner’s first book of poems, Rain Through HighWindows, was published by New Issues. New poems have ap-peared recently in Shenandoah, Crazyhorse and The Indiana Re-view. He teaches at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.

Roberto Juarroz, one of Argentina’s most distinguished poets, has had collections of his work translated into English by both Mary Crow and W.S. Merwin.

Günter Kunert was born in Berlin in 1929 and exiled from East Germany in 1979. He has lived north of Hamburg ever since. Author of dozens of books, he’s considered one of the most versatile of German poets.

Melissa Kwasny is the author of two books of poetry, The Archival Birds and Thistle, which won the Idaho Prize. She is also the editor of the anthology Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950. She lives outside Jefferson City, Montana.

Alexis Levitin has won two NEA translation fellowships and has published ten collections of Eugénio de Andrade’s poems in English. He teaches at State University of New York at Platts-burgh.

Susan Lewis is both a writer and professor of law. Her work has appeared in numerous journals. Her Speech Quartet, with music by Jonathan Golove, is frequently performed and has been recorded by the Maelstrom Percussion Ensemble.

Terri McCord’s work has appeared in Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Cream City Review, Cimarron Review, and other journals. She has received a fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission and lives in Greenville.

Kevin McFadden has published poems in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Letters & Commentary, Fence, and other journals. His first-book manuscript was a finalist in the 2004 Tupelo Poetry Prize. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Andrew Mister, who received an M.F.A. from the University of Montana in 2003, now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Other excerpts from “Liner Notes” are forthcoming from Boston Re-view, The Canary, and Five Fingers Review.

Melissa Morphew’s first book was The Garden Where All Loves End, and her latest, Fathom, is forthcoming this spring. New poems are appearing in Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, and She-nan­doah. She lives in Hunts­ville, Texas.

Muriel Nelson has published two collections of poems, Part Song and Most Wanted. She holds master’s degrees from the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program and the University of Illinois School of Music.

Amy Newman’s fall will soon be available in paperback from Wesleyan, and a chapbook, The BirdGirl Handbook, is forthcoming from GreenTower Press. Recent essays and poems appear in Image, The Hollins Critic, The Laurel Review, and Hotel Ameri-ka. She teaches at Northern Illinois University.

Martha Ronk’s most recent books of poems are Why/Why Not and In a Landscape of Having to Repeat, winner of the PEN USA 2005 award in poetry. She also publishes fiction and teaches at Oc-ciden­tal College in Los Angeles.

Natania Rosenfeld’s poetry has appeared in many journals, and her critical book, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, was published by Princeton University Press. She teaches at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.

Sandra Simonds is a Ph.D. student in creative writing at Florida State University. She received a B.A. from U.C.L.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of Montana. Her poems are forth-coming in Volt, Pool, and New Orleans Review.

Paul West is the award-winning author of twenty-two novels and eighteen works of nonfiction. Two books are forthcoming: Tea With Osiris, a collection of poems, and Achilles on Viagra, about his dance with the effects of an aphasic stroke.

Nancy White’s first book, Sun, Moon, Salt, won the 1992 Washington Prize for poetry. New work is forthcoming in Field, Feminist Studies, and other journals. She lives in Cambridge, New York.

Grace Wilentz is a junior at Harvard University studying poetry and the Irish language. She is interested in Irish grammatical structures and how they might be transposed onto English. This spring she is doing research at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Roger Williams lives in Hurricane, West Virginia, and works for the state. His poetry has appeared in a number of magazines and is forthcoming in Image.

Jason Zuzga is currently the James Merrill Writer-in-Residence in Stonington, Connecticut. He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and received an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. His poetry has appeared in Fence, jubilat, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.