Posts classified under: Poetry

For nearly a century the cliché “publish or perish” has haunted the professoriate. This gloomy refrain lingers on in faculty lounges and doctoral programs. Why must the professor write, and for what purpose?

Resisting a politics of rights and duties, he develops an epistemology and phenomenology of interiority and explores the circumstances under which one might move beyond one’s self.

Her Inspiration An afterthought’s refracted glimmer swims To her, minnow-darting under reflections Leaping patternless; the flames of rage pillage Recurring…

Betty, I cried in the night, come closer. I’m chilled to the bone, and my brain is foggy; A kind of numbness steals through every limb.

Rose After the thorn I made myself such, Barbaric, forlorn To all that I touch. A rose has a way…

A freight train bellowed from faraway over shreds of cold sunset. Homes and cars in this tight valley have become…

Jim studied the drop from the bridge to the white caps. Too much time to regret it. A gun would be better. A gun wouldn’t allow for second thoughts like a plunge from the Gate, and a bullet would be more reliable than a fall from a four storey Victorian.

During the Protests We praise the clink of dinner plates Stirring in evening suds, and thank You for the snow’s…

Singles Hours change hands Like small denominations. I can’t sleep and tell Myself time is money. With me, a man…

(a dialogue about revolutions, 1789 and 1917)

She tapped, three times at my door, Each time she tapped, I shouted— “Who is there?” Each time she paused,…

While trying at age eighty to survive my own recent heart attacks, I'm writing these rhythm-variations of dying for Joseph Brodsky (for, not about, not to), who died of a heart attack January 28, 1996.

A man intrinsic as the thought If A then B and so on Will tie the hours in a knot,…

When those who’d rather undermine than fight Approach with picks and spades to bring you down, To cave the earth…

Idea-drugs don’t help very much.

Solidity rushes on. You move in a moving maze.

This story is loosely based on an encounter between the Russian photographer Yevgeny Khaldei and the American photographer Robert Capa, as reported by Michael Specter of the New York Times, in a July 1995 interview.

That such a question can be asked . . . is punishment enough.

And yes of course you saved me for continued use.

Loving thy neighbor is hard to do: that dirty, ignorant, stinking fellow Black or white, Hindu or Jew, requires you…

We who worry along paths our ancestors took with surer steps, what is left to us? Is it to lie…

Winter snow covers Twisted steel and cracked marble.

That great hulk of a man, Dr. Johnson, Had many ills both of mind and body

Among tall aspen—leafy, elegant—and spruce, severe, the road has crested over Willow Creek Pass,