Per Contra An International Journal of the Arts, Literature, and Ideas

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issue 30 > poetry

  • Afternoons

    by Gastão Cruz. Translated by Alexis Levitin.
    I met you one afternoon outside Harrods
    a surprising being ambiguous
    diluted
    in the rain of a precocious October twilight

    More...
  • Apartment

    by Sarah Kennedy
    Shouldn’t I feel walled off here, walled in, safe
    and newly-locked, watching this winter storm
    smother the pines, not skinned by memory:
    a glove’s rows of stitches, pillow pushed down
    tight as a body on mine? Light—from where?—

    More...
  • Speaking Doves

    by Sarah Kennedy
    Here, the men in the temple fail to see
    as the angel sails shepherdwise, heading
    for the childless disgrace that is Joachim.

    More...
  • The Rig Veda

    by Leonard Kress
    Every Sanskrit word means itself, its opposite,
    the name of a god, and a sexual position.
    Which means that any Sanskrit poem could yield as many
    as two-hundred and fifty-six different meanings.

    More...
  • To the Unnamed Hero/Harlot in Gilgamesh

    by Leonard Kress
    Let him see you naked, let him possess your body.
    When he comes near, take off your clothes and lie down with him.

    More...
  • Awe

    by Paul Nemser
    There’s always water behind the trees.
    Even when there is no water
    or only an inch or two in channels, the sheen
    brings up the background.

    More...
  • Febbre a Febbraio

    by Paul Nemser
    Do not pare your nails too far back.
    You will need them to peel back
    the tape on your arm. That arm

    is a map of the sewer system of Rome.

    More...
  • Housebreak

    by Hollis Robbins
    My phone in hand I contemplate the mess:
    The wreckage of a settled life defiled.

    More...
  • Sonnet: Epithalamium Dissent

    by Hollis Robbins
    What is left to say about the moon
    In fourteen lines, no less. I wonder how
    To find in rhyme the wrath those curves arouse.

    More...
  • Resolution

    by R.T. Smith
    After the slaughter of the suitors, the hall
    scorched and scoured, Odysseus traveled
    to his father’s farm, eager for reunion.

    More...
  • Gospel Banjo

    by R.T. Smith
    By Coleman light, due to weather,
    Brother Dewey Crosby smiles
    as he frails the Gibson Vintage,
    and his fingers are fewer
    than the commandments, his teeth
    as white as lambs, feet
    shuffling in half-time
    with the healing hymn.

    More...
  • Book One of the Pharsalia of Lucan

    translated by David R. Slavitt
    Consuls were corrupted and Tribunes were tainted, too.
    You want the fasces? Buy them. The people can be managed.

    More...
  • Crook of the Arm

    by David R. Slavitt
    I sleep on my left side with my right arm
    bent at the crook and my hand in my left armpit,
    snug, so I can feel against my chest
    a slight pressure each time I take a breath.

    More...
  • Tenses

    by David R. Slavitt
    “I read,” unless you are speaking, is whatever tense
    you or the context may want: it deigns to agree.

    More...
  • Piano Music

    by Alice Teeter
    Sometimes when your mother plays the piano
    in her house above you on this mountain,
    You sit on your porch and listen.

    More...
  • Maine

    by Lewis Turco
    Over the meadows the Mayflies hover
    Away from the shade of the maples' cover
    Where downy woodpeckers are drumming

    More...
  • Prologue

    by Lewis Turco
    From a clump of clay   Aruru created
    The hero Enkidu,   molded him
    In the image of Anu.   God of the Sky,
    Free as a fawn   in the forest of cedars,
    Noble offspring    of the host of Ninib.

    More...
  • Canto I: Nimrod and Lilitu from The Hero Enikdu

    by Lewis Turco
    Nimrod entered   the fertile forest
    And found the traps   that he had dug
    Had all been filled   with soil and scrub;
    That all the springes    he had set
    Had been sprung,   had trapped no game.

    More...
  • David R. Slavitt: A Tribute


  • Prolific and Impish: In Tribute to David R Slavitt

    by Kelly Cherry
    Not long ago, writing about David R. Slavitt's 2011 novel The Duke's Man, I found myself saying that he composes the best sentences in America. I want to start this tribute here, with those sentences. They float, those sentences. They are so unburdened by the trivial or any kind of distraction, so transparent, that it would be too gross even to say that they are like angels in the sky. Because they don't just hang around in the sky like angels; they are the sky.

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  • A Maze of Musement

    by R.H.W. Dillard
    One has no choice but to think of Aristotle
    And the hare, or was that Archimedes,
    Or possibly Samson, keeping up
    In any case is hard to do, amid the broken
    Arts and elevated ephemera that dot the eyes
    Across the trees and into the shallows, ...

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  • David Slavitt

    by Daniel Mark Epstein
    He is one of a few writers--I can count them on one hand...well, one and a half hands--who were nearly legendary to me before I met them, men and women whose work I greatly admired whom I would eventually be proud to call my friends. The first was John Crowe Ransom, the poet, the second and third John Barth and Harry Crews, both novelists, the fourth or fifth, if I recall correctly, was David Slavitt. These writers have nothing in common but proven genius, a certain eminence, and the fact that I knew or know them as civilians as well as soldiers in the campaign for beautiful letters.

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  • Problems to Solve with Wit

    by Gail Holst-Warhaft
    It’s hard to know what to say about David Slavitt or any writer who has produced 100 books. Inevitably such prodigality arouses suspicion (maybe he works too fast, perhaps much of it is sloppy or worthless?) and envy (how slothful can one be, producing only a book every couple of years?). And yet, with the exception of the novels he wrote under a pseudonym, the quality of Slavitt’s writing and translation is remarkable. Academics have nipped at his heels over the freedom he has taken with his classical texts, but by the time they caught up with him, he is busy with the next large project – Ovid, Virgil, Aristophanes, Ariosto, Boethius. Poets might wish for a smaller corpus (poets these days are wary of abundance) but grateful for the poems they’ve gotten round to reading.

    More...
  • David Slavitt

    by Burton Raffel
    In this era of electronic speech, friends and cooperators are often physically unknown to one another -- unless direct communication of voices can count as direct contact. David Slavitt and I have had a good many of both varieties, messages on electronic paper, voices on electronic telephones. But if he came walking down a sidewalk, I would not know who he was.

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  • A Few Notes on David R. Slavitt

    by John Ridland
    The name of David R. Slavitt may not yet be one to conjure with in literary circles, although if he were a magician, let’s say, or a juggler, his skill in keeping so many poems, novels, translations, and other works in the air would have drawn gasps of astonishment and awe, as he added title upon title until he has now tossed out for our enjoyment over 100 books.

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  • The Race is Not to the Swift

    by Mark Rudman
    Anyone who hasn't had a private performance, with David doing all the voices for the opera he wrote in collaboration with Frederick Wiseman, should immediately sign up.

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  • On Reading Slavitt's Lucretius

    by Mark Rudman
    Appearance and reality are never one in a world where nothing is certain beyond
    the secret violence that makes sure there no cessation of action

    no     break       in the one unabated occurrence we can count on,

    change, which attends the continual violence in volcanic cones
    scotches   what chance    our dreams of release

    More...
  • To Do the Word: A Salute to an Old Friend

    by Henry Taylor
    I have been acquainted with David Slavitt’s poems for nearly fifty years, beginning on the evening of May 6, 1964, in the MacGregor Room of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, where he and Fred Chappell gave a joint reading. He has described the occasion in his collection Re: Verse (2005), acknowledging the generous effectiveness of George Garrett in arranging it. Within a year or two, George had arranged to transform one of his own reading dates into a trio by adding David and me to the program. He may have pried loose a little more money for us from the host institution, but most of what we received was probably cut out of his own honorarium

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  • David R. Slavitt, The Per Contra Interview

    by Miriam N. Kotzin
    I’m not sure whether this is a question, but it invites a comment. I am a quick writer. Stendhal was fast; Flaubert was slow. The issue isn’t speed but quality. Either way is good. The advantage of having so many books – 91, now, actually – is that this is discouraging to literary critics. So there’s less nonsense that has been written about my work than there might be if there were less of it (and less work for the would-be critic).

    Anybody who undertakes to “do” me has so much to deal with that, unless he or she likes it or is totally insane and a masochist, the chances are that he or she is an admirer.

    More...

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