Last Bender

Tim Congdon Tim sent me this in February of 2008. I will miss him. He ‘tore through the iron gates of time’. My love to Zach, who lost a father. The rest of us lost a poet and a sort of human wolverine who refused to concede to disease or reality one quark more than [...]

Evil While the red-stained mouths of machine guns ring Across the infinite expanse of day; While red or green, before their posturing king, The massed battalions break and melt away; And while a monstrous frenzy runs a course that makes of a thousand men a smoking pile– Poor fools!–dead, in summer, in the grass, On [...]

This is the apocalyptic, visionary Whitman, the Whitman who is akin to Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Here, in a single stanza he goes from a vision of ice to a vision of an unearthly city, utterly destroyed. This was before the civil war. He seems to have ascended to a Hurqulayan Interzone. Or else he fell asleep [...]

Hayden Carruth, 1921-2008 The Last Poem in the World Would I write it if I could? Bet your glitzy ass I would.   Like many poets my age I first encountered Hayden Carruth without realizing it, by reading his anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us, in high school. Here was where we discovered [...]

Mayakovsky led me naturally back to Whitman. I remember well being astonished by Whitman in high school. Here was a man in the mid 19th century who saw it all, saw everything. But over the years he became an encrusted classic. Every now and then I would pick up Whitman and sometimes he’d strike lightning, [...]

What I think of Niedecker changes with my mood. This is from the 2002 Collected Works. Before that, as with Oppen, there were incomplete or eccentric selected editions of her work. One, From This Condensery is, according to Jenny Penberty, the editor of the collected edition, “seriously flawed”. It is also a gorgeous book and [...]

This is from Doctor Drink, by JV Cunningham. 4. Epitaph for Someone or Other Naked I came, naked I leave the scene, And naked was my pastime in between.

George Oppen was poorly served by early collected and selected editions of his poetry. I could never get a toe-hold on his work through those publications. But the 2002 New Directions edition, The New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Davidson, changed all that. Here were all the poems published as he had originally published them, [...]

This a poem of George Oppen’s, a favorite of my friend Randy. I had read Oppen and not had much sympathy for him until Randy showed me this one, in The New Collected Poems. But all of that is for another post. For now I just want to put this poem up. Psalm   Veritas [...]