Ruins

The city as a shifting ruin / Particularly though not exclusively / As an American phenomenon / Most of my lived life / Haunts me, blocks knocked / Down in “urban renewal” now blank…

Night Stop

“He has only his open hand and his sweetly accusatory Bless you. We have only to turn our heads and he’s gone….”

Lamenter-in-Chief

Let us hope that Pinsky’s new Selected Poems will help to dispel the more jaded views of his accomplishments. For Pinsky is an important figure. He is also, as Tony Hoagland has rightly observed, “a much stranger poet than is generally acknowledged.”

Radical Poets Set Jewishness Adrift

A review of Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture: Don’t let the title dissuade you from reading this provocative book. The poets and thinkers represented here, many of them groundbreakers in American literature and thought, don’t know what it means either. That’s the point — to define these terms so as to answer a question that has not yet been posed in American poetry: what is radical Jewish poetry and how is it related to secular Jewish culture?

hand

Carving Fresh Initials on the World Tree

Imagine the ancient artist, before the tribe has gathered, putting aside his charcoal crayon or horsehair brush, chewing lumps of an ochre-rich clay, and spitting it in bursts through a narrow reed, to create a fine mist of color capturing the silhouette of his hand against the wall. Was it a kind of signature?