Tag Archive

The Death of Adam: A Kaddish

Adam is dead and I eat Greek yogurt in my office between classes.
Adam is dead and I reply to emails requesting recommendations.
I purchase Iron and Wine tickets for their November show on South Beach.
I buy Band of Horses’s “The Funeral” off iTunes and Adam is dead at twenty-two.
Adam is dead and the Yankees win another. »

Experiments in Revision, Final Reflections

by Niki Selken
You know how it feels to write or make a first draft of something, then rework it until it shines like the top of Chrysler Building? You know how you kind of want to burn that first draft, so that no one will ever know the embarrassing wreckage of over-obvious, trite, and self-indulgent. »

Forever, or Whatever

Poetry by Elaina M. Ellis

1.

Can a free-write about marriage be free or is it an oxymoron?
Marriage begs payment: pay for the husband to take the woman (cow)
off the hands of her father, as father grows tired of the girl-gone-woman (cow)’s
need to be fed?. »

Broken men were her specialty

Poetry by Janette Kim Larson

oblique sermon in the strip mall
man dressed up as pizza
arms restrained beneath
soft
beige
polyester
such lust. »

Experiments in Revision, Part 4

Lisa McCool-Grime
Senior Poetry Editor
Synthesis: This is not so much an act of combining as it is an act of harmonizing. Which parts of the previous drafts have shown themselves to be extraneous and unnecessary? Which parts augment and support one another? What is the best flow for these remaining moments? What connective tissue must. »

The Cantos

I hear Ezra Pound croaked
without making a sound.
No last rasp as his crooked
legs crashed. I hear your aunt
passed. I apologize. “I am nothing
but bereft for her.” This is a chant
& I realize 89% of Americans die
in a hospital. Or so I hear. Or
so it goes. & my
lost friend gasps in a waiting
room. I guess I’d. »

Experiments in Revision, Part 3

Lisa McCool-Grime
Senior Poetry Editor
In this series we have thus far presented a long, action-loaded rough draft and then a total scrap-and-revise, tanka-inspired revision. This week’s installment is a list poem—a sister-shadow poem heavy with nouns; a counterpoint to the verb-heavy first draft. Here Niki Selken makes a descriptive list of things her narrator encountered. »

robinhooding

Why I’ve got today
This niggling feeling
Like I’m The Principled Nazi
Lieutenant With a Conscience defending
A downed RAF pilot
Of pure shamrock Irish stare
(And this for fookin’ nuthin’:
He’ll die, of course he will, shot
In the head by some Gestapo and I –
I’ll never make it captain).
Sorry, mate, I tried, but
Listen up:
You’re a temp,
Cannon fodder
With runny emerald, puppy eyes,
Just. »

Experiments in Revision, Part 2

Lisa McCool-Grime
Senior Poetry Editor
Tanka is a Japanese form that can be roughly approximated in English with five lines using a syllabic pattern of 5-7-5-7-7. When I first began working with it, I found it to be an amazingly tidy container for difficult to contain emotions. So in reading Niki’s first draft, I immediately thought of. »

Typewriter

Poetry by Whitnee Thorp

On Sundays we’d go over,
my grandmother and I, to see her ex-husband,
my grandfather, at his apartment a block away from ours.
On Sundays, the typewriter
would be in the same spot, at the head of the table,
covering a yellow smoke stained place mat.
He’d set a papyrus-thin white paper
through its clicking rounded black tongue. »

Experiments in Revision, Part 1

Lisa McCool-Grime
Senior Poetry Editor
In 2007, I was visiting my friend Owen at his art show: portraits on the grandest scale done in aerosol on 8′ x 8′ panels. It was the last hour of the last day of the Durham Art Walk in North Carolina. When all of the passers by stopped passing by, I. »

passively, with known intent

Poetry by Nikia Chaney

lie to him, listen
to the hummingbirds, lay
in bed a bit longer, laugh
and pretend to hate the smell
of heat and give over the thought
of this call. »