Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Craig Santos Perez (Kenyon Review blog):
Why banish poets from the empire if empire can use poets towards its own ends? Use poets to wash over the empire’s crimes, use poets to feign respect for humanity, use poets to poeticize the ideology of empire. Blanco’s poem, “One Today”, is a poem of American exceptionalism and immigrant exceptionalism—of “one empire” built by many settlers on native lands. There it is, Mr. President, sitting there, for USE.
[Where will I go
when we call one another mad,
pulling off bride’s and bridegroom’s ribbons,
fooling like mad five o’clock scissors
with my papers?]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 24 January 1659/60.
dry needlepoint— pewter
dotted with spiked filaments;
brittle ice and scum on pond.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
[Down came the axe and found my head,
which made very pretty beef.
I stayed and played a dark stone,
being round and great.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 23 January 1659/60.
Asphalt
fades to white
from weeks of salt.
Ice stitches
jack-knifed feathers
in the ditch
beside
the gray ridge
the snowplow made.
Phragmites rocks
in the wake
of passing trucks.
Blow on the stones,
clap wood and flint
to parry cold and
bleakest night; plant
decoys before sprinting
off with real fire—
What boldened rush,
what streak through
burning brush? A duty
bidden by the moon:
to steal the secret
of the buckle’s gleam—
O birdling, o almost
completely fledged,
the branch on which you
teeter is alight: come
now to bridge the air,
no vertigo or fear—
In response to Via Negativa: Buckles to my shoes and small stone (210).
And the poem: does it hold you,
welcome you, swallow you whole?
Does it burrow in you like a secret,
wind the key a little tighter
in the lock, unravel like a bright
string of yarn plucked from a sleeve?
Does it send down the night like a maw
or use the silhouettes of trees for fringe?
When nothing stirs, it’s easy to think
the mountain’s cold heart won’t thaw.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
[I sat with duty and guilt and shame,
a brother to the poor.
This day I began to put on buckles to my shoes.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 22 January 1659/60.
1
In the brass section at the inaugural,
the cold is a mouth full of teeth
knocking against a fleshy cage,
trying to avoid the frozen graft
onto the mouthpiece—
2
On the corner, in the abandoned
church, the beautiful door
with ornate carvings that summer’s
high heat had held so close,
can finally be pushed open—
3
Who has not in childhood laid
upon their tongues the salty iron
taste of keys abandoned in the backs
of drawers? I can see them even now,
a row of skeletons beneath the alcove—
In response to Via Negativa: Domestic arrangements and small stone (208).