For the first time this year, The White Review Poet’s Prize was open to poets based anywhere in the world. Last month we announced a shortlist of eight poets. ...
Jake Orbison is a writer from New York. His work also appears in Ambit, the Boston Review, poets.org, and elsewhere.
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Everything I’m writing has been short recently
I don’t like to write endings I’m bad at them
Endings must have a stake in what happened,
and I’ve never been interested in what happened
Where have we been? Endings ask
Where must we go from here? They answer
Some people, lucky ones, can only write endings—
as if forever in state of taking stock and gazing out,
as if to fall, to fear, these things could go on
indefinitely, as if shadow were just another word for shade
‘To live,’ writes Walter Benjamin, ‘means to leave traces’. As one might expect, Benjamin’s observation is not without a certain melancholy. Traces are lost...
