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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
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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?—
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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by
Hollis Robbins
My phone in hand I contemplate the mess:
The wreckage of a settled life defiled.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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translated by
David R. Slavitt
Consuls were corrupted and Tribunes were tainted, too.
You want the fasces? Buy them. The people can be managed.
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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.
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by
David R. Slavitt
“I read,” unless you are speaking, is whatever tense
you or the context may want: it deigns to agree.
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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.
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by
Lewis Turco
Over the meadows the Mayflies hover
Away from the shade of the maples' cover
Where downy woodpeckers are drumming
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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.
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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.
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David R. Slavitt: A Tribute
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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
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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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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.
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