Song of the Sunshine State Song of the Sunshine State
Campbell McGrath's entertaining and frustrating fifth book of poems--every single one of them devoted to some aspect of Florida--raises two large questions. One has to do with rep...
Mar 28, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Stephen Burt
Sonnet: Against Making Blood Speak Out Sonnet: Against Making Blood Speak Out
If I die one day from the bullet of a young killer-- a Palestinian who crosses the northern border-- or from the blast of a hand grenade he throws, or in a bomb explosion while I'...
Mar 28, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Meir Wieseltier
The Marvel of the Obvious The Marvel of the Obvious
"There are things/We live among 'and to see them/Is to know ourselves.'" These three lines are among the most stirring written by George Oppen, a poet whose modesty and honesty p...
Mar 7, 2002 / Books & the Arts / John Palattella
Messenger Messenger
The birds stopped coming after the annuals died. I didn't realize how much I missed them until the bluebird Returned, lured by the burgundy haze of the fall pansies Pour...
Feb 28, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Jennifer Franklin
Not Betsy Rosses Not Betsy Rosses
For a while I thought about designing a flag. Something bigger, blurrier than "nation." I imagined a hovering planet on a field of blue, and "United We Stand" could be written un...
Feb 21, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Eileen Myles
Lost in America Lost in America
"When I write, I bid farewell to myself," Jimmy Santiago Baca said in 1992. "I leave most of what I know behind and wander through the landscape of language." This is a memorable...
Feb 14, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans
Filipineza Filipineza
In the modern Greek dictionary, the word "Filipineza" means "maid." If I became the brown woman mistaken for a shadow, please tell your people I'm a tree. Or its curli...
Jan 31, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Bino A. Realuyo
‘The Ghat of the Only World’: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn ‘The Ghat of the Only World’: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn
The first time that Agha Shahid Ali, the great Kashmiri poet, spoke to me about his approaching death was in April of last year. The conversation began routinely. I had telephone...
Jan 24, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Amitav Ghosh
Lines Beyond the Nakba Lines Beyond the Nakba
Mahmoud Darwish burst on the Arab poetic scene in the mid-1960s with the publication in Beirut of poems written while he was living in Haifa, Israel, and working as a translator ...
Jan 24, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Taline Voskeritchian
Three Poems Three Poems
* Zero built a nest In my navel. Incurable Longing. Blood too-- From violent actions It's a nest belonging to one But zero uses it And its pleasure is its ow...
Jan 17, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Fanny Howe