Short Takes on Long Poems, Volume 1
R.T. Smith, Michael Leong, Dana Levin, Paisley Rekdal, Cecily Parks, John Poch, Daniel Bosch, Spencer Reece, Michael Ryan, Sam Hamill, Erica Dawson, and Robert Pinsky weigh in (briefly) on their favorite long poems.
Red Clay
“When she slept, she began to dream whole conversations with Charlie. He spoke to her in the same sweet voice as our father’s Nat King Cole albums. In her dreams, he told her secrets of the animal kingdom; he told her his frustrations and he told her, again and again in his beautiful baritone, that he loved her.” A family’s participation in a chimpanzee experiment drives two sisters apart in this novel excerpt from Kaitlyn Greenidge.
Brother
Writing to a half-brother he didn’t know, Shane McCrae tells a powerful story of longing across race, distance and lies–a story of “water in a fist” where the brothers are “not the fist/…not the water/we the thirst.”
Onset
“When thought goes a long way away from the point, apply heat/and observe its tracks.” Taking her own advice, Rusty Morrison traces a mind through illness, noting the ways in which, “Indistinguishable from body’s surface, a net/of symptoms floats.”
from Bye-Bye Land
Sampling athletes, politicians and canonical poets (among others), Christian Barter tells the story of 21st-Century America in a poem whose range is matched by its remarkable narrative force.
Notes on Bye Bye Land
(Numbers refer to–in order–section, stanza, and line.) Part 1 1,8,2: Thomas Wyatt, “Forget Not Yet.” 2,1,1: “Ships, towers, domes, theaters and temples lie / Open […]
Ice Notes
“Glaciers! Looking at them my eye never knows where to rest,” writes visual artist Oona Stern in her journal from the Arctic Circle. Stern and composer Cheryl Leonard offer a window into their work-in-process, a series of installations employing sounds, maps, images and words recorded at the foot of calving glaciers.
from Labyrinth
“Still the heavy kick drum of the bull-man’s gait shakes the boy’s gut,” writes Oliver de la Paz in this opulent version of an ancient myth. “Still the labyrinth gathers its boundaries in redundant corridors.”
Frank Yamrus
Following a six year hiatus, Frank Yamrus reveals his I Feel Lucky series. He talks with Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching about his journey of self-portraiture and making the personal public.
Those Who Didn’t Run
Saxophonist Colin Stetson combines jazz musicianship, rock songcraft and the physicality of a grand slam final to create a truly unique and atavistically compelling sound. Stetson took a rare moment of mid-winter’s rest to talk to At Length about his breakout year, his physical limits and his rather daunting New Year’s resolution.
Homeric Turns
A masterful poem of suffering, storytelling and gods from Alan Shapiro, in whose hands “the rank and file/Massed for a sleep walk into corpse fires” can become, for a moment, “A figure now for storm clouds out at sea.”
The Classics Illustrated Comics Project
Five brand-new comics about adaptation, by Kevin Cannon, Pascal Girard, Melissa Mendes, Andrea Tsurumi, and Noah Van Sciver.
WM Hunt
With his book and exhibition The Unseen Eye showcasing one of the most singular collections in photography, W.M. Hunt talks about collecting and his tenacious passion for photography in a candid and insightful conversation with Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching.
Delusion’s Enclosure: on Harry Partch (1901-1974)
“LISTEN TO THAT.” Stephen Motika makes his own original music in writing the life, work and migrations of a composer who once asserted, “tongue must couple with the cavity or there’s no resonant tone. yes, this is sexy.”
Counting Down
What if there were a short film for each year of your life? Julie Lequin takes up the possibility in Top 30, an ongoing video project—part storyboard, part songbook—now showing here.