Chicago Review back issues from March 2005:
Introduction.
Mar 22, 2005; ... The idea for this special section on Christopher Middleton was born of a conversation with August Kleinzahler following a reading in Chicago a few years ago. We agreed that the lack of wider recognition of Middleton's work was unfortunate and needed to be redressed. This selection of ...
A Retrospective Sketch.
Mar 22, 2005; ... I first came to Austin, Texas, for the academic year 1961-62. When I came back in 1966, not knowing I would stay there, I was already thirty-nine years old. I did know that ties with Europe could not be cut; that I would carry Englishness uneasily around with me in the great primordial ...
A Feuilleton: Reinventing the Madeleine?
Mar 22, 2005; ... During the first few minutes of his recent Southwestern University Brown Symposium lecture on Gustav Mahler's Song of the Earth (1908-9), the musicologist Donald Mitchell gave an account of one mode of Asian music, heterophony, which I found exciting. What he said was this: "The music is ...
The Turkish rooftops.
Mar 22, 2005; ... Turkish country people like to sleep on rooftops. In bowers made of dry leaves or in nests of reed they can be found sleeping in the night or during the day. Village houses have one ground floor where in rooms framed by divans families gather, having first taken off their shoes, or around ...
Waiting for harvest moon.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Shadows thrown by people on a wall, A fragile charm, and they stand upright. More often the flat shadows, horizontal On a paving stone. You tread on them. No, the shadows are not thrown at all. If it be said that some shadow defined Significant bodies in a Venetian ...
The dead friends.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005 ... <Pre> Who can they have been In that red car Going by, so fast, waving And with a hello ...
Christopher Middleton in conversation.(Interview)
Mar 22, 2005; ... The following text is based on recordings made in October 2002 and in July 2003 when Christopher Middleton came to stay in London. The entire interview comprises seventy-nine pages and is published, together with "A Nocturnal Journal" and Marius Kociejowski's "CM: A Portrait", in Palavers, ...
Dance of the intellect.(Intimate Chronicles)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2005; ... There is much talk abroad in the land, over the endive and radicchio in places like New York and the Bay Area, about the dumbing and commodification of our literary culture along with the broader culture. The observation is well-taken if not exactly timely. The dumbing part has been going ...
Christopher Middleton and the bare bone of creation.
Mar 22, 2005; ... Amour fou? What's this, then? Early 1960s in London and some of us have been drowning in the drumming ploughland for a couple of years, so eager for a pure English poetry uncorrupted by the tediously experimenting Europeans and--Lord, save us from them--obstreperous Americans that we don't ...
The body in the word.(Brief Article)
Mar 22, 2005; ... It is not simple. It is opposite. Like revelation or dream, it does not lurk behind its signs. Full of fields, even when alone. Even if you rest all afternoon in a kingdom of caresses it engenders choreographies. And the voice goes deep. Archipelagos, you write, where begin, armadillos, ...
Habitation for a spirit: the art of Christopher Middleton.
Mar 22, 2005; ... In his essay "The Pursuit of the Kingfisher: Writing as Expression," Christopher Middleton is suddenly arrested by a memory: "I built a nest for a bird once, in my childhood." (1) With this memory, I feel, we are introduced to the original impulse that would define Christopher Middleton's ...
Elsewhere.
Mar 22, 2005; ... There have been two modernisms, the imaginative and the prescriptive, and the pity of it is that the two have been confused, or their relative importance transposed so that the prescriptive has in some quarters come to be regarded as more fundamental than the imaginative. No doubt it was ...
A few fragments for Christopher.(Christopher Middleton,.)(Brief Article)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> A notion of me, from what's on my shelves. Up my sleeve. (Life and reality not entirely separate.) Photos of great paintings. Hieroglyphics on a turnip. Galileo's ship at sea. Einstein's train. </Pre> A day, considered as a span of time, period gone through ....
Analogie.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> So empfangt in durchsinterten Hohlen dich Stille und Schweigen Feuchtigkeit und Dunkel und dein Geheimnis. Aus diesem Erdenschoss trittst ...
Analogy.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> So you are greeted in wintered caves by mute silence dampness and dark and your secret. From this earthen ...
Es ist das Jahr.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> der leeren Strassen. Kein eilfertiges Blech in Sicht. Sanfter Schneefall. Keine Fussspur fuhrt irgendwohin. Es ist der Tag am Ende des Jahres. Wo verbleiben wir denn? Das Weiss deckt uns ...
It is the year.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> of empty streets. No rushing metal in sight. Soft snowfall. No human tracks leading anywhere. It is the day at the end of the year. And where do we remain? Whiteness covers us ....
CM: a portrait.(Christopher Middleton.)
Mar 22, 2005; ... I was in bed when Christopher Middleton first entered my life. I had been sequestered there for almost a month with a refractory spine. The drugs I took, pure codeine at one point, were such that I wept through the whole of World Championship Darts, so moved I was by those Apollonic ...
Andalusian dreams.
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> O king, whose ancestors were noble of mind and blood, To whose favors, a rope of pearls, my throat has responded, Adorn this hand of mine now with a falcon. With a falcon honor me, one with shiny wings, feathers Ruffled by the ...
Seven pastels.
Mar 22, 2005; ... Utah, Canyonlands, Near Needles. 2003. Pastel on paper. 17 X 14 1/2 in. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Wine Jet Wing I. 1998. Pastel on paper. 17 X 14 1/8 in. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Cooling Tower, River, Forest I. 2002. Pastel on paper. 17 5/8 X 14 1/4 ...
Letter to Christopher.
Mar 22, 2005; ... One night, a little more than a year ago, I had just finished a long and intense discussion at the office, which to a certain extent explained the anguished lucidity of my insomnia. Towards midnight I embarked on the same ritual I performed each of those sleepless nights: ...
Travelling in Turkey with Christopher M.
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Legend, you are the one, the who The woman jumping out of the global box The song the wave the blue in the veins Which has no completion ("Discourse on Legend") </Pre> When I was one of Christopher Middleton's graduate students at the University of ...
Middleton in Asia Minor.(Christopher Middleton)
Mar 22, 2005; ... Some years ago, scrambling up a canyon that winds through Jabel Rumm in southern Jordan, I heard a muezzin's call to prayer carried by the wind, amplified and distorted into a low rumble by the sheer sandstone rockface that towered above me. The sound was acutely disorienting as I had been ...
Air, necessary to life.
Mar 22, 2005; ... THE MOST IMPERIOUS OF NEEDS Most imperious among the needs which rule over us are those of food, drink, and sleep. So long as hunger does not exceed its lesser sibling appetite which seasons and gives flavor to the coarsest of dishes; so long as thirst remains only that faint ...
Christopher Middleton: bibliography, 1962-2002.(Bibliography)
Mar 22, 2005 ... A. 1 Poetry/Prose Torse 3: Poems 1948-61. London, Longmans, and New York, Harcourt Brace, 1962. Nonsequences/Selfpoems. London, Longmans, and New York, W.W. Norton, 1965. Our Flowers & Nice Bones. London, Fulcrum Press, 1969. The Lonely Suppers ...
From PROMISE X (a novel).(Excerpt)
Mar 22, 2005; ... One At a point in my life when most of my friends were burying their dads, I was meeting mine for the first time. I should tell you that he wasn't my real dad, but that he was someone who came to say that he was my dad, and that I believed him, and that he believed me, and that ...
That the ground is reasonable.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> i reaffirm that the ground is reasonable ...oh that you might come back such burnt earth returns nothing now. i reaffirm that the ground or being is reasonable, she welcomes me and listens to me listening she, but it it is ours, gone down to, comfort. now i have created a new ...
Oath.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> by the little daggers of my dear, the very legitimate tendernesses of his spirit/body i swear. to go on before the courts and flowing lectures, to animate the light with furious weight. i needed to take the oath to go on in the previous torment but there was nowhere to swear ...
The icon am i burning.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> im doing this twice the couple and in the couple there are two couples the neg and the pos there are two pretty babies the menage a trois young blond and the baby who is better who gets better every day there are two couples ones tyrannical and one is healthy why always two minds ...
Grave of light.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> how is this wing different perhaps it isnt if half of a unity the. the tail tall grass the grass not so tall grew around the cement slab which was littered and said to myself ill probably have to clean up here clean it up house in the mountains this is my house in the mountains my ...
Bit.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> I Learnt a flutter from the pavement where Math or Bird navigate. for cant say you. wuz cot in a glidder star a star a star a star recourse its necessary Floor, ocean-fed--the bottom feeder was something someone said. Christ had this comprehension apprehead lit ...
Burial.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Ice on an ice cave. I guessed you knew that. Done thought thinks you was been a mind reader or Thinks that the limit inside itself Murders the word with electrical shock. Suicide solidifies in a soaked uncrushed mandible I'd like to be an alley cat's meal When the world is ...
Witch.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> A life that wasn't was-- saw it in half, sewn to scribble. Tried in halves with working wings, Angelic--no King or Queen to ...
Immortal sire.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> "Rabbits on the grass" like "all his good women," an effect like vertigo. When I was a child, the sun was socialism surely on my foot, my heart was made of wine, I dreamt, I still had all of you to ...
Solar volcanos.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> If I appear to play the violin, it's only to keep my head on. Everything heavy falls in September, a firetruck lost on polar seas. I see the blueness in our thinking, lit up from behind. Turning to salt, turning to stone, I'm turning into ...
Buds and bulbs.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Continuing to rise, all that's written is "love," a cracked overture, your physical stitch. It's noticeably colder above the road to self- rule. Even beneath a crayon sun, the bottle tipping into folly ....
Tiptoe lightning.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Tragedy saunters to the pit, swinging its depth charge. If you had x-ray vision you could watch my bones climbing the Mountain Vainglorious without quite touching the ground. Let's ruin our letters, erase all foreign prospect. So many expeditions are but fictive ...
Loud cracks from ice mountains explained.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> The alarm in my heart is made of silly brass, some of us can't help but mourn the end of Lorca. Rain continues into rain, fire interrupts my car with all the better reason of the forest. I see misfortune in the eye of real weather. Pronouns understand their game before we join the ...
How is your family.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Hardly paused for breath since the island of Manhattan has to anticipate mostly secondhand boxes of explosives the surrounding community allergic to her own happiness in any case as a modest plan lollipop of hope it's a wide shot faith returned in the sentences ...
Everything about how.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Each day started with dangerous even immoral proficient in reading boast of the new he uttered the word don't much matter worked in not only the clothes at heart an ornamentalist in what is essentially that they met something to be desired never to touch ...
Multistorey.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Here flooding through hearts' machinations, pierced rummaging, then were re-bound to stanch Who did I cut in on this-- heralds though well-motivated pass, flop round from cot to school to office, some effluent spillage a lunar pull shapes, looking helpful but scarcely ...
It takes a thief: an interview with Camille Guthrie.(Interview)
Mar 22, 2005; ... This interview began with my review of Camille Guthrie's book The Master Thief (CR 47:2, 2001). Guthrie sent me a letter of appreciation after the review appeared, filling in some details, noting some allusions I missed. Over the next year or so, we formalized a loose correspondence into ...
From the natural history.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> September heat wave evenings and gala patio receptions, waiters with sterling trays of hors-d'oeuvres beneath magnolia arbours. Sphinx moths orbit the lights over the bar. Above, misty stars faintly through city haze. High summer maximum foliage--wild grape vine, virginia creeper and ...
The gradualists.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> The live bootleg of Heavy Metal Meltdown made them weep to a man, though they were all shitfaced, and would probably have bawled over a well-made button, or that particularly persistent ad for microwave pizza. Still, it's a cheap business blaming the victim: no challenge for the ...
So familiar.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> You are the toy delivered at daybreak, conundrum to a storm of checkmarks, and still, so familiar to me this bale of regret I have strawdogged ... Cordwood, filibuster, young love caught under the porch with the chamois ...
Spell G.O.D.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved --Robert Bly The bluebirds in their beige hours nodding; nothing reasoned nothing reined, the dire quarrel put by until brunch, another polite tiff over forcemeats and poaching limits. Wherefore art thou ...
Swallowing.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Unspoiled, most schedules fly here: the flies leave the fields, the fields lie fallow, we watch swallows fly low, one swallow swallows a fly-- a circle always seems glamorous until it's you doing the swallowing. Pre-sunup, the dark mesas reign, then the windmills appear-- ...
The credit shot.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Serial killer Oreo cookie stacking competition plug climax the extras are extra can't work won't not in this lunch again a word out of you top down brain to genitals gut to flush out bag experience the wind, flare in its perennial end easy do that the gap from pate the ...
Ap ob nuat.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Stunned gut shifts in a mimicry of distracted is it lived, ready for my having, done to sit will it depute scars, finical outlast reel the sea in flippant to your gapped and shut up routine tantamount to dioxane remember that dream where the shop or it the beginning of a ...
Leek soup.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> "You can want to do nothing and then decide instead to do this: make leek soup. Between the will to do something and the will to do nothing is a thin, unchanging line: suicide." --Marguerite Duras Most people who make leek soup do not make good leek soup because they do not ...
The trouble with strangers.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> It was not my dog that bit off the stranger's arm. I may care for the dog and feed the dog and I have even paid for her grooming and for her colorful leash and collar, but does this entitle me to ownership? I am sorry for the loss of the stranger's arm and I hope with all my ...
Mirabunda.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> ... drawn by the sheer elasticity of that deep amber gaze, grew weight- less, didn't you, as if es- tranged from tables and chairs, wind and glassware: from whatever constituted, once, the world-at- large, for there, as if suspended within that dark idol of ...
Capturing the fleeting moment: photography in the work of Allen Ginsberg.
Mar 22, 2005; ... In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe provides a description of Neal Cassady that epitomizes the Beat quest for the moment: <Pre> Cassady in his movie, called Speed Limit, he is both a head whose thing is speed, meaning amphetamines, and a unique being whose ...
Duncan, Levertov, and the age of correspondences.(The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2005; ... The most interesting thing about The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov is the love story it chronicles, one as compelling in its asymmetries (Levertov adored Duncan, who took her into his superior confidence), as it is melodramatic in its content (as my friend Jeff Hamilton put ...
Jack Spicer in Berkeley: 1949.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> He was in Berkeley under an umbrella of rain watching a rolling ballgame wearing a raincoat in the dry season with no umbrella for shelter because he ignored the weather and his words lacked rain. His words lacked sun. They were birds in search of each other, like a ...
Letters, abroad and back.(Robert Duncan, Letters: Poems 1953-1956)(Book Review)
Mar 22, 2005; ... One of the books that coaxed Jacques Derrida away from phenomenology in the early 1960s was University of Chicago Assyriologist I.J. Gelb's A Study of Writing: The Foundations of Grammatology, a survey of work deciphering cuneiform pictographs dating from the two millennia before the ...
Graphology 81.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> It goes from snow to rain without anapaests or riven wheels of security, the hotfooters outside frat houses, those misnomers in the woods, those non-recognisers of Niedecker's birdstart or wingdrip, or silent about it, woodpeckers, oil lobbyists, think-tankers; where do I in ...
Graphology 91: what little I have left of memory.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> In the head rush I saw the carpet numbers, and the numbers of all foods were networked, and the modified plants grew through veins of strangers and uttered a welcome I dizzily knew to be unwell, even sick. I know that I require sun to grow, and without sun I grow beaten ...
Graphology 135: dawn thorn.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Proof too in maximum sentence to max out or tally names on stones; a sunset by beach and trees, a clan of proof-readers, a trance dance downtown, oh Byron Bay trendies, boutiques and shining four-wheel drives; pillar to post, molar towers analogous to coastline, pure ...
My sea legs.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> From then on, Zorba called me "Princess of Quite-a-Lot." She said my body became a praise-shack. From the catalogue, a new bed. From the neighbor's bed, a lace wig. She stenciled the ripe pets herself. She upholstered my vanity table in shag. She took aside her little nephew and ...
(Sweets).(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> I With my face dirtied. With a handful of silver nuggets perennial. I took Zorba. I took Zorba's watch to the apothecary. I asked for a dram. A doctor's worth of malaria. The regulation. Of pills. For a trip. For a discussion in the cockpit. I'd like to go south. I'd like an ice ...
Fondly, yours, sincerely, my love.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Dear Grandmother. Zorba is at it again. She's fat as a sow. I threw her into the basement, I diapered her, and now she's nosing around the sump-pump. I feed her through an eye- dropper. I feed directly into her neck. I've changed her prescription. Into each of seven blue surgeon's ...
Rallying on the plank, the porch swing leans in.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> The honeysuckle weeps like a lesion. Zorba in her cups hands me a sickle feather. She tells me to rid the rooster of his punch. His prim. In the extended shimmy of a late spring dusk I see outlined clearly the roguehair in Zorba's narrow chin. She gestures with the coke bottle ....
From given.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> along average city streets by the middle river in their proportionate gestures. whatever happens to be true of unspoken public decisions suggests a range of values. like spelling in an infinite series, the means by which to sweep away the trumpets: sweep suggesting loss or lack, to ...
House of polar hysteria.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2005; ... <Pre> Is a mixed state, agitation and depression, green eyes gleaming fruitfully from the snow. I cast the circle, invoke the professional lover, where is the topaz man when you need him. She cannot be trusted with a weekend. We dwell with Tyw, Wodin, Thor, Freya, never riddle over who ...