Recent writing
“Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’”: On Elizabeth Bishop and Disappointment
In prose that’s erudite and accessible, former Editor-in-Chief of At Length, Jonathan Farmer, explores why “[s]o many of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems end with something audibly, willfully unsatisfying.” Covering Bishop’s career from “The Map” (1946) to her late elegy for Robert Lowell, “North Haven” (1977), Farmer’s claim will send you back to Bishop’s poems with new eyes.
Whistlejacket
“[W]hat am I to do / about beauty, about / my fear that beauty // has made me arrange / every experience in a word / and image too neatly // for them to bear / much semblance to life,” Paisley Rekdal asks in this confessional, ekphrastic poem written in response to George Stubb’s famed painting of an Arabian thoroughbred, “Whistlejacket” (1762), on view at the National Gallery in London.
Sarracenia
“[H]ow do they bear this heat Who / knows who can say what will change,” Joanna Klink writes of this poem’s eponymous plant, also known as trumpet pitchers, as she explores our climate crisis and her relationship with her father in language that is both colloquial and catastrophic, meditative and urgent.
From the archives
Irma
“When I say ‘te amo,’ I bend a border to you.” Shifting from word to image, language to language, scene to scene, Paul Hlava Ceballos assembles a portrait of his mother from contested memories, amid ongoing erasure, and in honor of her lifelong work of making a life for them.
Muscularity and Eros: On Syntax
“Possibly the most disturbing thing about prosody–but about syntax especially, because it involves choice–is its utter fidelity to our innermost–truer?–selves. We sing–and we are betrayed.”Carl Phillips maps the work of syntax through examples from Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Tommy Pico, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Sharon Olds, Ed Skoog, Linda Gregg, and francine j. harris.
Two Visual Essays: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
After Terrance Hayes completed American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, he found he had some remaining fragments and lines that yet “begged … for shape.” From them he has been making drawings.
Gest
“When time breaks you can feel it in your body at noon when half the day is done and again at 3 pm when you are going home.” Page Hill Starzinger’s poem of her parents’ decline tries to restore the house they can no longer keep. “No, my father said, don’t do that, it’s not a good house.”
Never So Much Seething: Twenty-Five Liner Notes and a Poem for Fugazi
A look back at youth and Fugazi by Philip Metres.
Homecoming
Running out of trouble in Bed-Stuy — and into it in Virginia. A new story from Belle Boggs, winner of the 2009 Bakeless Prize in Fiction.