Announcing the White Review Poet’s Prize 2019. The Poet’s Prize was founded in 2017 with support from Jerwood Charitable Foundation, and is for English-language poets who are at the...
THE KITE C. 1755 One doctor of lightning, floating on his back down a river held his kite...
On some level, I’m sure, every poem is a failure A lot of theory says as much, and I have always thought this was to do with our desire to reach out and touch the things that poems clamour to caress But failure is so easy to claim, it’s less a matter of Icarus falling into the sea than the boy canon-balling in the swimming pool Which is forbidden for a reason As a young boy, I was ashamed of my body, and I insert this detail just to personalise the dryness of the problem that I’m presenting, which is how to make a poem touch a person? How can you guarantee, with the only things you have to work with, what poets over-generally call form, that you can move someone? It can’t be by self-exposure, or maybe it can, but I can’t do that I looked over at you reading in the library before we really touched each other, and continued to think about the ways a poem might somehow not reproduce the logic of late capitalism So many years down the line, the distance is so much larger; I thought that everything was a love poem, provided that it collapsed I thought it was the single frozen moment of the splash that we apprehend after the fact and remember as beautiful It was you who made me feel the inadequacy of my justifications, that I had expected that failing to love you would be easy
We did not know it would leave us here. Our sun sits bored as a dog at noon, gnawing...
before, we were all girls then it changed
then there was Eve then there was Madonna
heaven help me then there was shame, torn blue
robes how old were you when you lost your body?
when you knew it was not your own to name?
we tried Alice, Dorothy, Lolita we tried boy-child
some were thrown bare-chested some were thrown
on a wheel we tried Catherine we tried manhood
do you remember running naked in the long grass?
do you remember when it rained, thinking it rained
all over the world? kiss me baby when we were girls
we were very small then we became bigger than ever
we became larger than life standing in the storm
in a ripped tuxedo, standing on hot sand in cleaved gowns
can you remember which ribs are false?
which ones are true?
