June 14th, 2009
Our guide is Vladimir Nabokov’s ghost, who speaks only in anagrams of his own name (MAD VIM. RIVAL BOOK!). Anagrams of Pale Fire, a poem of 999 lines by the American poet John Shade, also abound.
Dark Ice is a long poem with detailed notes and parodies of notes, in which Russian and American history begin to melt, run together, and recrystalize into strange new forms. The poem appeared in print in Bomb; the poem plus the notes appeared online on the NABOKV-L Listserv, and on the International Vladimir Nabokov Society’s Zembla website. According to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which gave me a prize, the poem presents ”a marbled-paper dreamland where cultural antitheses are swirled together.”
You can read it here:
Posted in Experiments, Poetry, Publication, Writing | No Comments »
May 20th, 2009
Read the poem “Light Emitting Diode” in the Yale Review. Brief sample:
We are abstractions, as if the infinite
Had to eat, hold down a day job, ride the bus.
Posted in Poetry, Publication, Writing | No Comments »
May 2nd, 2009
Epiphany recently published a poem of mine called Wax and Glass and another called Bundles of Bronze Sticks. That was in the last issue; see the current issue (Winter/Spring 2009) for some poems by the wonderful Martin Edmunds.
Wax and Glass, by the way, follows this pattern in stanza line length:
2
4 (2 x 2)
16 (4 x 4)
256 (16 x 16)
The squaring has to do with the subject of the poem.
Posted in Experiments, News, Poetry, Publication, Writing | No Comments »
May 2nd, 2009
Read and experience Nightmaze (Flash required), an excerpt from my novel Incidents of Travel (not yet published).
Posted in Experiments, Novels, Publication, Writing | 1 Comment »
May 2nd, 2009
Outside to let Mustafa eat a little grass and experience a few minutes of the warm, damp spring night. He is unusually still. The night is quiet. The small maple tree I planted earlier in the week is unsure of itself, with limp leaves. I hope it lives.
Posted in At Random | No Comments »