i.m. Donald Rodney (18 May 1961 – 4 March 1998) Emblems of countless martyrs devoured by the Atlantic, who remembers that slavery was monarchical, that historical atrocity came directly from the divine head, that gravity cannot be numbered. Do not seek to be venerated or to win the appraisal of civic awe, like for instance…
All me sparks fly all night; all my mouth axle bright, wheel the true guillotine serpents’ fleck amber sweat off my waistline, sibilant as touch-me-nots’ shuttered leaves rattling Death in the Arena. Honey Blight and Armageddon. I am Thorn Tongue, bare sprite-child nerved against neon slush and ants trap, I squeal, bitten, “Mother O mother……
Paleontologists disagree about whether dinosaurs were thriving or had already entered a long decline when an extinction event finished them off sixty-six million years ago. Depending on who is right, the asteroid that struck Earth either radically changed the direction of evolution or merely accelerated an established trend. Disasters that target the currently dominant species…
According to Wallace Stevens, “Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words.” We often put “the idea” in a brief phrase: “the evils of war.” We rarely talk about the poetry of the idea. By itself, the theme, the idea, is always banal: it…
After almost three-quarters of a century, how are we now to think about Lolita? It may well be the most commented on novel written in English in the past hundred years, alongside Joyce’s Ulysses. In the case of Ulysses, the imperative for commentary is chiefly a consequence of the invitation to exegesis generated by that…
Amendment XIII Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. In our age of roiling discontent,…
A young king, swashbuckling, expensively schooled in rhetoric and swordplay, with your gold-threaded tunic and plumed helmet fitted over your patrician nose: so you tossed bandits off cliffs and captured a bull—what do you know about war? Labor is for peasants, labor pains for women. But you waded among the suppurating dead on the fields…
—when angels fell out of the bookcase along with old newspapers, torn road maps from decades past, and a prize edition of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry : suddenly the catalogue tumbled. The painting, the show, Peter Blume’s Recollection of the Flood, the studio where I slept as a child those nights when…
If you hurt yourself before someone else hurts you, is that homeopathic? Watch me prick poison into my skin, sign my name in pain. Watch me miss the appointment, cancel the call. Watch me gulp smoke and receive a certificate of enlightenment between the smeared egg-yolk horizon to the west and the bone-white eastern sky:…
Carefully you balanced the old mattress against the box spring to create a teepee on that frozen December patch behind the house, carefully you stacked cardboard in the hollow and touched the match to corners till flame crawled along the edges in a rosy smudge before shooting twenty-five feet into darkening air. Fire gilded each…
The great choreographers have all been more than dancemakers, none more so than George Balanchine. He was in truth one of the supreme dramatists of the theater, but he specialized in plotless ballets with no named characters or written scenarios, and so this aspect of his genius has gone largely unexamined. Instead, everyone accepts the…
Fiorello La Guardia was a great mayor of New York — he even has an airport named after him — but he made some boneheaded errors. Some years after the Sixth Avenue El in Manhattan was razed, La Guardia and the city council decided to rehabilitate the neighborhoods around the thorough-fare, which had become run…
