http://www.poetryfoundation.org/ ℗ & © 2009 Poetry Foundation en-us Sat, 21 Nov 2009 8:20:50 GMT Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237988 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:43:35 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237988 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237990 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:43:42 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237990 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237992 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:43:50 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237992 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237994 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:43:58 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237994 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237996 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:44:10 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237996 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237998 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:44:17 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237998 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238000 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:44:25 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238000 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238002 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:44:34 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238002 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238004 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:44:43 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238004 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238006 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:44:51 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238006 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238008 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:44:58 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238008 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238010 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:45:06 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238010 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238012 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:45:12 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238012 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238014 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:45:20 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238014 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238016 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:45:29 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238016 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238018 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:45:36 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238018 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238020 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:45:44 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238020 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238022 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:45:50 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238022 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238024 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:46:02 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238024 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238026 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:46:10 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238026 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238028 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:46:17 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238028 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238030 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:46:27 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238030 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238032 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:46:35 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238032 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238034 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:46:43 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238034 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238036 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:46:54 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238036 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238038 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:47:13 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238038 Poetry magazine.]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238040 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:47:04 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238040 During the years when walking was impossible, especially in this car-crowded city of hills and sprawl, when arthritic pain nailed me to my desk chair, the only way to feel that freshness was to walk through others’ lines and times, against the grain of my language. That was the pleasure of translation—of moving and being moved across a landscape into the foreign, and taking on form and sense as they shuttled between the eyes and ears and lips and tongue. Looking down the alleys of assonance, and into the crannies of consonance. There’s a glittering weed—or was that planted?—in any case, it’s shining. Let me bring that back into an English weave. There’s a car bumper holding the sky. Now a breeze shifts over a knoll, rushing through a scrim of jasmine. Is that literature or is it life? How can I capture—no, create—no, capture—the pitch of that coolness and scent?

]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=238042 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:47:37 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=238042 This is actually an abstract walk, one I’m making up, a generalized walk based on what I like. I have usually done this on a bicycle, but I was asked to write about a walk, so I’ll walk. I’m walking along a road, not a busy road, a country road, but one where people do occasionally have things blow out of the back of their truck or their car window or even where people conceivably have littered. In any case, there are scraps of things here and there along the roadside. Bits of things, fragments of color and print, broken shapes, fading pink receipts.

]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=238044 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:47:45 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=238044 Habit is a stabilizing psycho-biological compass. I have a major one: to take a walk as soon as I get home after even a short flight, not just because I don’t have a car and the ground is where I feel ready to deal with the things of the world, but because when I’m up in the ether, I feel physically incomplete. Locomotion makes me more palpable to myself, fleshed out, self-locatable. So I observe the habit, climb three flights to my apartment, drop my bags, walk back down the stairs, then down the hill through my neighborhood. If I’m still travel-dressy, I buy my lettuce and avocados at the corner market or plant myself in a cafe wearing suit and white shirt or whatever I wrapped myself in before departing that now-nearly-forgotten-wherever.

]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=238046 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:47:50 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=238046 Where I walk is the town of w, some nine miles south of the city of N, though W consists only of some six streets, unless you include the estates that stretch mostly northward but ever more eastward too, and I cannot help thinking of the old, of whom there are many, gathered in their sheltered housing, with their old names, the same names you see on the war memorial, since this has been a stable community for generations, some of their children and grandchildren still working in the shops, sometimes with their parents as in the case of P, the butcher, whose middle-aged daughters come in Saturdays and are particularly to be seen near Christmas when everyone is ordering turkeys and the queues extend outside the shop . . .

]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=238050 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:48:03 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=238050 Athenians cannot be proud, the joke goes. Because if their nose is in the air, they won’t see the potholes under their feet. The sidewalk is the most dangerous place to walk: watch out for motorbikes, cars backing up, tree stumps, broken pavement, sunken entrances, marble slick as ice, stray dogs, other people who aren’t looking up.

]]> http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=238052 Fri, 30 October 2009 15:48:09 GMT http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=238052 Notice the role of desire: I wish. The loving dialogue, a man speaking to his mother, giving back the care he received. The powerful, defiant transformations: the poet turns approaching death into a woman’s breasts, and nothingness into a cradle. Notice too the near hopelessness of the desire and the way the poem holds out, not eliminating hopelessness but never defeated, maintaining life in the face of annihilation.

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