Madre A woman How many times we fled from the world, How long they burned our hands: Long we served the office of giving birth, cooking dinner, raising beasts. They relegated us to be trophies, in the halls of important men. We bit our tongues in the face of insults, we stayed our fists, before […]
Madre
Beached
There’s a picture of myself I’ve remembered wrong for years. In it, I imagined, I am standing next to someone (at a football game, I think) who was never quite more than an acquaintance and putting on an overeager smile. I have shocking streaks of dark purple and deep rich red in the hair just […]
The Listening Rooms
Listen to Sarah Minor read “The Listening Rooms.” https://fenceportal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Minor_The-Listening-Rooms.mp3 69. The Meaning of Night From her front porch, the woman sees a man walking towards her with an exceptionally tall head. He is wearing a backpack and moving along the sidewalk with a head that is five times the height of a human skull. The […]
The Neapolitan Smorfia
I wrote these three poems, and others like them, in collaboration with la smorfia, a southern Italian dream interpretation system. The titles are created using images from recent dreams and the corresponding numbers, as indicated in la smorfia. Instead of using the numbers to play the lotto (the traditional use, which I’ve tried unluckily), the numbers here […]
The Neapolitan Smorfia
Return to Tetaroba
https://fenceportal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Alvarez-Return-to-Tetaroba-Audio-3_15_23-2.13-PM.mp3 w. the burden of history Roberto & I travelled deeper into Mexico | an overnight bus ride from Tucson through Sonora & into Sinaloa | stopping finally at El Fuerte the largest city in the area | & only miles away from Tetaroba el rancho | we took a taxi from el Fuerte to […]
Civilizational
1. Cleavage of pre-linguistic intuitionharnessed bybardistry on task for‘the environment’ * People can? or can’t? choosea sex * Nuclear power (not bombs)– back […]
Notes Towards a Failed Book
Any response to the question, “What’s the matter with American poetry right now?” addresses, at least implicitly, the fate of language itself in society at the present time and the role of poets in cultivating and defending language. As guardians of the vigor of language, poets readily — and even stereotypically — express a weighty […]
What’s the Problem with American Poetry Right Now?
This is a companion to Fence Issue #40’s forum in print, adding additional writing and thinking to the conversation. Here you can find: “Alternative Arrangements” by Andrea Brady Selections from “The Garden” by Julie Carr “Return to Tetaroba” by Steve Alvarez “The End of Writing / Things I Forgot I Wrote” by Daniel Borzutzky “Inventory” […]
Six Problematics in Contemporary American Poetry
This essay also appears in print in the Forum pages of Issue #40. Mono-Sectoral Poetic Myopia If we put together a pie chart graph indicating the percentage of economic sectors given expression in poetry journals, presses, conferences, prize dispensations, there would be very scant representation from, say, the service industry, or manufacturing, homecare, construction, retail, […]
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