Readers:
After 85 consecutive issues of Plume, we will take a month-long hiatus to catch our breath and make final adjustments to the new website. We will step away 1 September and return with issue # 86 on 1 October – on the new site!
Other news will be announced over the course of September by our new Associate Editor for Social Media, Amanda Newell, and will appear on our newsletter – which we still will send, with a surprise or two, just to let you know we are here and trying to make Plume all we think it can be, for you and for our contributors.
Of course, you can reach me anytime by email.
Be well – and see you 1 October!
Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume
Adam Scheffler on “Charade” I think of this poem as a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. I write poems in batches, filling up a journal until it’s full, and then typing it up, editing it extensively, and discarding most of
Featured Selection
NM: I’m intrigued with these innovative new poems. It’s remarkable how each use unique and singular stylistic inventions to track a consciousness as it struggles to orient itself in rapidly shifting physical, psychological and cultural landscapes as a result of
Reviews
Crawlspace Nikki Wallschlaeger Bloof Books $16, 82 pp. May 2017 “instead of the stanzas the rooms” —Bernadette Mayer Poetic forms are constraints. A constraint gives form and body, and also creates space. A
Essays and Comment
The Miłosz Festival, which takes place in the city of Kraków over four days during the second week of June each year, prides itself on being the largest event of its
This Month's Selections
A VARIATION Why ask to know, twin and neighbor, if, as it unwinds, the string of our lives has resolution, lies in a direction, why today’s ache was once a noon pleasure. The gods have no plan for us. We
Very dark now I put a seed in my mouth but its texture and taste are too unfamiliar! I spit this strange seed out. I do this over and over, forty-five times before understanding I must no longer think of
After the service and reception hour the church is locked, and what was in the air is left to settle out, the hymns and prayers, the candle smoke, the fragrance of flowers, and the last living soul, who checks the
Photographs, 1949 In one, they pose, grinning straight at the Kodak, The backyard elm, long blighted to death, at their backs. It’s years since either parent was alive. How did it happen? Last week, I turned 75. We live our
Take the worst poem you’ve ever written but that you haven’t abandoned or tossed out—it simply doesn’t satisfy you. And no one else thinks much of it either. If it’s long, reduce it to fourteen lines plus three as a
Always in the faintest glow of pleasure, and always at its whim, you take what you can, and love it. As does the king. The rest of it bellows, a dark you fear but can’t take. You’re home, you’ve always
Less monotonous and less abstract than flowing water, even more quick to grow and to change than the young bird we watch every day in its nest in the bushes, fire suggests the desire to change, to speed up the
Go now to the silence. It has longed for you as a mother longs for her ransomed child. Go, and take off your shoes, your gloves, weave from your shadow and ache a rough blanket. Lie down. Your body knows
It is an affront in their land to remind someone of that first exile because they recollect the sojourn with terror still and regret the loss of it. All those dawns, roads, splinters, whiskies and hard chairs, all that fucking and
– By fire, then, but within view of a rough sea? Yes, he said. And: That’s perfect. And: Don’t stop. Clouds moving behind leaves in front moving Carl Phillips is the author of, most
I was at the beach talking with someone else when he twisted my arm till I heard a crack. That was real. But last night it was a dream: I’m at my locker when he slams my shoulder hard. Clatter
I was thinking of the sad scentlessness of film, of how everyone in that scene from Charade – where they pass the orange under their nuzzling chins – is dead. xxxxxxxxxxxxxNo wonder the doctors keep ringing us up as meat, covering