Poetry & Fiction

The Past Is A Grotesque Animal

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Excerpt from the unpublished novel Dzhokhar Tsarnaev I Love You.

After a few years of silence, R began to receive death threats again from Kaveesha, the Berkeley ultraleftist child of Tamil Tigers. He sent her memes of Mayo jars to remind her she was white. This is just sad, R said. If he were getting to some real deep cruel shit, I would be into it. (She was an extreme emotional masochist).

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Then he started sending her love poems by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. He didn’t stop sending her death threats. She asked me to write a response to his ludicrous, dangerous, manic emails. I told her my days of ghostwriting for her were over. (No more eulogies, elegies, birthday wishes, love letters, etc. You’ll have to write your own suicide note, I told her. We all have to write our own suicide notes, at the end of the day.)

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That Month

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Wrists bound with satin cords, they wed in June.
Till death or an affair, he said in June.

Moon-fuelled, she keeps each man a month, shows her
faces to Caleb in May, Ted in June.

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New Directions: Aram Saroyan’s Q&A with Gerald Hausman

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After meeting Gerald Hausman as a fellow poet and colleague in the Poet-in-the-Schools program in Massachusetts in the early 1970s, I soon admired his poetry. The work seemed to me a fresh incarnation of a tradition I identified with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. Uniquely, looking into those early chapbooks today, the work continues to hold its charge.  Over the years, while we stayed in touch and exchanged books, it was only recently, with the publication of two new books, Little Miracles and Mystic Times with Noel Coward in Jamaica, both of which might be characterized as nonfiction novels, that I recognized he’d in the meantime emerged in a way I never could have imagined. In his prose the same ease and accuracy remain, and a deceptive modesty in the tone, but the explorations have expanded and magnified in all directions. I haven’t read anything that has affected me so powerfully in years. A.S.

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Late Bouquet: Pansies from “Easily Pleased”

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The book’s title, Easily Pleased, comes from an interview with Louie Bashell in Polka Happiness by Charles and Angeliki Keil (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1992), 141. Bashell muses:

It’s a very melodious music. Simple music and melodious; you don’t have to be a genius to play it, you know, or have good technique, or anything like that. It’s just a flowing music. Polish music has various frills and trills in it, a very distinct flavor, while Slovenian music is plain, simple notes that just move–nothing fancy. I’ve never come across a piece of Slovenian music that was difficult. The Slovenians are so easily pleased. They don’t have to have nothing special.

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After the Pandemic

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We’ll share lipstick and buffet brunches,
nights dancing in empty swimming pools,

Drake on the playlist –Baby, come closer—
our hair coiffed at last, but now falling,

falling and frizzing around our bare faces.
We’ll rhumba and shout, a joyous aerosol,

the vapor of here we all are,
the jumble and heat of you can’t

get us now. It will be a miracle
if we don’t undress

or queue up at kissing booths
or board a cruise for Marrakesh.

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Insurrection Snapshots

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Words aren’t swords, or bombs,
gunpowder, guns, dragons.
Not a scaffold with a waiting noose.
Words aren’t religion, airplanes,
torn-out panic buttons,
flagpoles or fire extinguishers.
Not a zip tie. Not a wick.
Just the flame.

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The Bitter Logician and The Trimmer: Rereading Allen Grossman and Eugene Goodheart in My Middle Age

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Penniless and nearing thirty circa 1990, the one ace up my sleeve was that I “worked with Grossman.”  Grossman.   The Brandeis English department’s quite literal resident “genius” poet and pedagogue.  In August 1989, Allen R. Grossman had in fact received a John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur “Genius” Grant.   Needless to say, I owned no mutual funds back then, but Grossman’s stock was on the rise when he was my doctoral adviser.

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