by Adam | Thursday 3 May 2012
Essay on Adam by Robert Bringhurst There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell. Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four: he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him. Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam. The...
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by Adam | Friday 20 January 2012
As I may have bragged about a few times before, I'm currently the occupant of W. H. Auden's old apartment in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, Kings County, New York, U.S.A. I've been reading more of him so I can channel his...
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by Adam | Sunday 1 January 2012
I Outside the men were drinking bottles by the fire and laughing. The women were inside drinking wine and saying, whatever it is they say, when we’re turned away. I saw you through the window beyond two orbits of...
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by Adam | Sunday 18 December 2011
Thou shalt not live within thy means Nor on plain water and raw greens. If thou must choose Between the chances, choose the odd; Read The New Yorker, trust in God; And take short views....
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by Adam | Tuesday 18 October 2011
Every year that Philip Roth is passed over for the Nobel Prize in Literature is a year that blessings are blocked. That said, this year's "winner" is a Swedish poet whose work, like everyone outside of Sweden, I had never...
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by Adam | Thursday 21 July 2011
In the midst of reading Philip Roth's I Married a Communist (don't act all surprised) and I'm early into it, but I stumbled across this passage and I wanted to unpack it. I wanted to partake of the national character....
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by Adam | Friday 15 April 2011
Check out this vintage (can I say 'vintage' without smacking of a be-turtlenecked West Village furniture designer?) footage of Leonard Cohen reading some of his work from 19-freakin'-66 at the 92nd Street Y. And read more poems you slacker....
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by Adam | Saturday 1 January 2011
Another Year Come I have nothing new to ask of you, Future, heaven of the poor. I am still wearing the same things. I am still begging the same question By the same light, Eating the same stone, And the...
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by Adam | Friday 24 December 2010
To Dorothy | by Marvin Bell You are not beautiful, exactly. You are beautiful, inexactly. You let a weed grow by the mulberry and a mulberry grow by the house. So close, in the personal quiet of a windy night,...
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by Adam | Wednesday 17 November 2010
In Chandler Country | by Dana Gioia California night. The Devil's wind, the Santa Ana, blows in from the east, raging through the canyon like a drunk screaming in a bar. The air tastes like a stubbed-out cigarette. But why...
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by Adam | Monday 20 September 2010
The only book of poetry to escape the Brooklyn tornado(!) unscathed was Leonard Cohen's first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies. He wrote it when he was 22. It's frustratingly brilliant and, despite being set beneath a (newly) leaky window,...
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by Adam | Monday 30 August 2010
Just stumbled upon some awesome footage of TFR Board of Trustees Member Leonard Cohen hitting on a German girl in a 1971 documentary....
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by Adam | Saturday 27 February 2010
(reprinted without her permission. it's a little too late at night for me to phone her). As it stands, I am in Woodbridge, Virginia. The sidewalks are coated in nasty, leftover snow. I already miss riding my bicycle to the...
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by Adam | Thursday 4 February 2010
True Story Darling, you cut the eyes from the dead. You harvest them and like an unnamed tribe of savages you give them away: a miser reaching enlightenment some filigree fibers laying reflective siege upon the cornea of a black...
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by Adam | Sunday 27 September 2009
PRESIDENTS | W S Merwin, The Carrier of Ladders (1970) The president of shame has his own flag the president of lies quotes the voice of God as last counted the president of loyalty recommends blindness to the blind oh...
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by Adam | Wednesday 15 July 2009
Diffident breezes pass plastic bags and silicone through the continuum, a fit of shade, a narrow corruption. Pages of fiction, explanatory answers flit like switchgrass in July, the month of fuck all, with peppers of malaise and torrid prudence....
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by Adam | Monday 18 May 2009
No more with the twisting hoops and rivulets of 1994/95, repeats of binary refrain: clutch city and the dream shake, the return of the glide and the kiss of death. It's on to what? Baseball or summer knolls, concrete...
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by Adam | Tuesday 17 March 2009
Dear Loyal Readers: I urge you to check out the poetic stylings of my big sister Amelia in the literary journal 580 Split. Satisfaction guaranteed. Best, Adam...
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by Adam | Monday 5 January 2009
The morning was already gone, like a person dissembling, and it had left without waking me, which was, in some ways, a relief. A neighbor made eggs for me and her boyfriend and we watched football until the game...
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by Adam | Thursday 25 September 2008
All day the stars watch from long ago my mother said I am going now when you are alone you will be all right whether or not you know you will know look at the old house in the...
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by Adam | Friday 22 August 2008
My arms are still bare from disuse, I’ve not gotten them full of blood or dirt or children, as my zayda did, butcher of kosher kids and angel of them too. Beneath my shirt there are sprouts and sprouts of...
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by Adam | Monday 18 August 2008
Neil Diamond concert fourteen thousand white people are dancing badly...
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by Adam | Tuesday 12 August 2008
In the summer mornings I feel legs pulling against mine – a trainer serving a track star – laps have been completed but the clock was not running, so again this one doesn’t count. Maybe next time. My cupboard is...
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by Adam | Wednesday 6 August 2008
Girl on the BART train to Milbrae There was a cut-off and she just made it (suitcase in hand); it was pink beyond flamingo and bubble gum, she wore an aqua marine fleece and turquoise socks, all the pastels of...
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by Adam | Friday 20 June 2008
In New York when I sleep with the window open I do it with the feeling of also being ajar. The noises carom through the apartment canyons and arise in me a distrust of what I'll never fathom: my neighbors...
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by Adam | Wednesday 14 May 2008
It's hardly credible how it's 3 A.M. again on Sunday -- Mother's Day May -- and I've put my flask on a stranger's sill and bared my chest getting smaller by the year. The blinds are down in the...
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by Adam | Monday 21 April 2008
I am enclosed by people that I know, who made me possible somehow but I disguise them. I’ve begun to find tiny hair, weeds they Creep around my shoulders like an embrace tightening for the worst, dark constellations of ivy,...
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by Adam | Thursday 10 April 2008
These stones are being piled upon old ones, like Herod did, upon the ramparts and moorings of last century with its twiggy litter and bottled-all. Strangers only half-thirsty for pop lemonade the ounces remaining went to the critters or...
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by Adam | Friday 28 March 2008
You weigh heavy like a color upon a set of endless tracks. You pin another pocket of resistance – borrowed - from a tin of metal tacks. It’s spring you know where are the cranes? Perching buildings devolving to three...
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by Adam | Saturday 2 February 2008
It is Saturday; always start with time. To follow: I am in my apartment. I've decided to make it a Sabbath. I worked Friday night and it was slow until friends and regulars stopped by and we all just...
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by Adam | Sunday 20 January 2008
Day Two: Jetlag Above the Kinneret, 6:44 A.M. I was stranded like a vessel on the water; I put faith in nature and set myself adrift, isn't that how all epics begin: a tide of repose and resignation, a tide...
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by Adam | Monday 19 November 2007
From W.S. Merwin's The Moving Target and probably a top ten all-time favorite poem. Home For Thanksgiving I bring myself back from the streets that open like long Silent laughs, and the others Spilled into in the way of rivers...
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by Adam | Monday 29 October 2007
Confessional I loved you quickly and fully like anti-aircraft shot in evening lamplight. You were mine but I never spotted you return fare, thought you could afford it. I believed in other Gods, I know that’s the first commandment, sorry....
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by Adam | Monday 13 August 2007
I was dressed in rags before I came through your open door, as Elijah was, and you met me inside, luring me to wine at the family table filled with endlessness. The erasure marks of moderation, of portents, there upon...
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by Adam | Sunday 12 August 2007
Trying to look as French as possible here. Champs Elysees: Part One One day when I'm traveling dishonestly, I will wake up early (or stay out all night) so that I can walk the Champs Elysees when it's empty...
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by Adam | Thursday 19 July 2007
He was formed half by the ethics of his father and half by the cruelties of war... -Foreword to a Yehuda Amichai anthology. #4 of Amichai's Seven Laments for the War-Dead 4 I came upon an old zoology textbook, Brehm,...
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by Adam | Friday 22 June 2007
Solstice Dusk was counterveiled by the rivulets and burnishes amid the comedy of the park. We met on the longest day and we had no letters on or need to request its cessation. I stayed on your pillows beset by...
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by Adam | Friday 6 April 2007
Yesterday I was in the midst of writing a particularly blasphemous posting about the Chipotle burrito and how I had an argument with someone about whether a tortilla should be considered chametz or not when suddenly my blatherings were...
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by Adam | Friday 19 January 2007
The Water Cooler They're poisoning the atmosphere now you and I've split because they're trying to get something clear. The mistletoe puts up its mitts now you and I've split. The black oaks jostle and the mistletoe puts up its...
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