Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 62 – September: and you’ll be very happy to discover – no anecdotes from that miscreant youth of mine. In fact, just these few words by way of preface to the Featured Selection
Featured Selection
I recently re-encountered the 9/11 Commission report. It’s a good, if politically-simplified, document—a useful, painful, reflection of its times: just when you thought you’d never hear the names Paul Wolfowitz and
Reviews
In this month’s installment, reviews editor Adam Tavel examines an English poet’s seventh book. Luna Park by Grevel Lindop Carcanet Press $19.95, 80 pages published November 2015 In “O Taste and See,” one of her
Essays and Comment
The Barbarian Invasion of Poetry (Hurrah!) And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. —C.P. Cavafy This just in: the Empire of Poetry has fallen to the barbarians.
This Month's Selections
The sunflower Rain-soaked since noon Obscures the head of a woman With a cold compress on her brow Observing the aphids She shifts her eyes To a spot on the opposite wall Where a frame is affixed With a glass
N27P23 (2/2/14) suddenly here & then here “through perpetual experience I plunge into the thickness of the world.” <211>
so strong a wind blows from the facing mountain range to the hanging apron in the kitchen, the roof swings along like a rusty pendulum. we are farthest from the ambulance in the street and the cemetery in front
Everyone here has so many faces, And I have only a few. I have to wear the same faces over and over. Because of this the people here think me unfriendly, they warn their children against me, they complain
If all of us were to try to kill ourselves at least once, then all of us would know nothing more than that: which is why Primo Levi may have had a dizzy spell before he fell over the stair
DIE ENTFÜHRUNG Den Falken, den er eben gekauft, an der Wange, singt auf dem Verdeck der Knabe den Händlern, die laut ihm jubeln und lauter, bis dass ihm wegreisst die Stimme der Wind, die Rahe ihm schlägt ins gewendete Lachen
after Deborah Luster’s Rosesucker Retablo, III In gravel dust and starlight, after the hummingbirds fell in a necklace of two weights, there is no squinting here in surround sound, in static at knife point, or at least the
Rose-Scented Lotion The level of rose-scented lotion daily lower in its bottle. And because we are not attempting to fill it, time slows to a standstill. The room brims with silence. Afternoon nap? Not yet afternoon.
Oral homophonico-mechanical translation of the opening lines of “La Glace sans tain” from Les Champs Magnétiques by André Breton & Philippe Soupault, using MacSpeech Dictate. Lag sol time Please are the big good door, no one is so did
I thought I heard outdoors the rain dancing on the tin shed again. I think, maestro, not more of that in the bargain…You know your sense of humor is a slow pavane with figures of Medieval honeycomb and raisins forbidding
I wanted to go fishing one day, I felt a little despondent. I made between the cat’s tails with a hand an air hole in the duckweed. Light rose up from underneath out of the black mirror ground. I saw
What is Love in Tennis, and What is Love If there’s personality in how you jump, then I wonder about how you fall. Down the rabbit hole into a man’s magazine: girls stripped naked, rosy-cheeked, flushed out