American Poetry

States of the Art

Bradford Morrow, Bradford Morrow

• Publisher: Conjunctions
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781480479197
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

" Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work." — The Washington Post With work from the seventy-five poets who are the game-changing, bar-setting voices of our time first published in this volume, Conjunctions: 35, American Poetry is the definitive collection for the contemporary poetic landscape. Includes astonishing uncollected work from masters of the form, as well as breathtaking new ventures from risk takers such as Juliana Spahr and Kevin Young. Contributors include John Ashbery, Susan Wheeler, and James Tate.

Six Poems

Jorie Graham

PRAYER

Am I still in the near distance

where all things are overlooked

if one just passes by. Do you pass

by?

I love the idea of consequence.

Is that itself consequence—(the idea)?

I have known you to be cheap

(as in not willing to pay out the extra

length of

blessing, weather, ignorance—all other

[you name them] forms of exodus).

What do I (call) you after all the necessary

ritual and protocol

is undertaken? Only-diminished?

Great-and-steady-perishing? Unloosening

thirst,

or thirst unloosening ribbony storylines

with births

and history’s ever-tightening

plot

attached? We’re in too deep the bluebird

perched on

the seaweed-colored

limb (fringed with sky as with ever-lightening echoes of

those selfsame light-struck weeds, those

seas)

seems to be chattering at me. Too deep?

Someplace that is all speech?

Someplace everything can be said to be

about?

Will we all know if it’s blindness, this

way of seeing

when it becomes

apparent? Is there, in fact [who could

tell me

this?] a

we? Where? The distances have everything in their

grip of

in-betweenness.

For better [she said] or for worse [he said]

taking their place alongside the thirst

in line, something vaguely audible about

the silence

(a roar

actually) (your sea at night) but not as

fretful nor as monstrously tender

as the sea wind-driven was

earlier on

in “creation.” Oh creation!

What a mood that was. Seeding then dragging-up life and

death in swatches

for us to forage in. Needle, story, knot, the

knot bit off,

the plunging-in of its silvery proposal,

stitch stitch still clicks

the bird still on

its limb, still in the mood, at the very edge

of the giddy

woods

through which even this sharpest noon must

bleed, ripped into

flickering bits.

It is nothing compared to us

is it, that drip and strobe of the old-world’s

gold

passaging-through,

nothing bending its forwardness, nothing

being bent

by it (though the wind, rattling the whole business,

would make one think

it so). Nothing

compared. And yet it is

there, truly there, in all sizes, that dry

creation—

woods, dappling melancholias of singled-out

limb-ends, lichened trunk-

flanks—shocked

transparencies as if a rumor’s just passed

through

leaving this trail of inconclusive

trembling bits of some

momentous story.

Was it true, this time, the rumor?

The wherefore of our being here?

Does it come true in the retelling?

and truer in

the re-

presenting? It looks like laughter as the

wind picks up and the blazing is tossed

from branch to branch, dead bits, live

bits,

new growth taking the light less brightly than

the blown-out lightning-strikes.

Look: it is as if you are remembering

the day

you were born. The you. The newest witness. Bluish then

empurpling then

pink and ready to begin continuing.

Lord of objects. Lord of bleeding and self-

expression.

I keep speaking this to you, as if in pity

at the gradual filling of the vacancy

by my very own gaze etcetera. Also the

words—here and here—hoping

this thing—along with all else that

wears-out—will

do. I think

about you. Yet is only thinking omnipresent?

Omniscience, omnipotence: that is all drama.

But omnipresence: time all over the

place!

It’s like...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• Epigraph
• John Ashbery, Four Poems
• Lyn Hejinian, Two Poems
• Myung Mi Kim, Siege Document
• Brenda Coultas, Three Poems
• Arthur Sze, Quipu
• Jorie Graham, Six Poems
• Michael Palmer, Three Poems
• Mark McMorris, Reef: Shadow of Green
• Susan Wheeler, Each's Cot An Altar Then
• Ann Lauterbach, Three Poems
• Clark Coolidge, Arc of His Slow Demeanors
• Gustaf Sobin, Two Poems
• Alice Notley, Four Poems
• Tessa Rumsey, The Expansion of the Self
• Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, Two Landscapes
• Forrest Gander, Voiced Stops
• Tan Lin, Ambient Stylistics
• Marjorie Welish, Delight Instruct
• Laynie Browne, Roseate, Points of Gold
• James Tate, Two Poems
• Honor Moore, Four Poems
• Leslie Scalapino, From The Tango
• Bin Ramke, Gravity & Levity
• Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Two Poems
• Charles Bernstein, Reading Red
• Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Charles Bernstein, A Dialogue. …
• Rosmarie Waldrop, Five Poems
• Martine Bellen, Two Poems
• Peter Sacks, Five Poems
• Reginald Shepherd, Two Poems
• Barbara Guest, Two Poems
• Donald Revell, Two Poems for the Seventeenth Century
• Paul Hoover, Resemblance
• Elaine Equi, Five Poems
• Norma Cole, Conjunctions
• Jena Osman, Boxing Captions
• Ron Silliman, Fubar Clus
• John Yau, Three Movie Poems
• Melanie Neilson, Two Poems
• Robert Kelly, Orion: Opening the Seals
• Nathaniel Mackey, Two Poems
• C. D. Wright, From One Big Self
• Peter Gizzi, Fin Amor
• Carol Moldaw, Festina Lente
• Charles North, Five Poems
• Robert Creeley, Supper
• Brenda Shaughnessy, Three Poems
• Malinda Markham, Four Poems
• Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow
• Nathaniel Tarn, Two Poems
• Peter Cole, Proverbial Drawing
• Fanny Howe, Splinter
• Anne Tardos, Four Plus One K
• Roberto Tejada, Four Poems
• Andrew Mossin, The Forest
• Elizabeth Willis, Two Poems
• David Shapiro, Two Poems
• Camille Guthrie, At the Fountain
• Susan Howe, From Preterient
• Cole Swensen, Seven Hands
• Susan Howe and Cole Swensen, A Dialogue
• Keith Waldrop, A Vanity
• Will Alexander, Fishing as Impenetrable Stray
• Juliana Spahr, Blood Sonnets
• Jerome Sala, Two Poems
• Leonard Schwartz, Ecstatic Persistence
• Catherine Imbriglio, Three Poems
• Vincent Katz, Two Poems
• Thalia Field, Land at Church City
• John Taggart, Not Egypt
• Renee Gladman, The Interrogation
• Laura Moriarty, Seven Poems
• Kevin Young, Film Noir
• Jackson Mac Low, Five Stein Poems
• Rae Armantrout, Four Poems
• Anselm Hollo, Guests of Space
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• A Note from Open Road Media
• Copyright