Celebrating 15 YearsEvent Date:
Tuesday, April 7, 2015 – 8:00pm
Location:
Webster Hall, Studio 2, Amherst College
2125 Stanley Street Dance Performance
April 1, 2015
News and Events
Dante Or, The End of Poetry
April 1, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry
for Raul Zurita
And he stirred his coffee, the old poet, and spoke of
Dante, and how Homer’s journey to the underworld
wove a thread through Virgil to the selva oscura. And
that the Commedia was not the apex of Christianity, but
its finale. That the enormous architecture of the poem
was not built to house theology, but to protect man from
the absence of God, who had already departed.
Hellgrammite Cloud
April 1, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry
By GARY METRAS
A cloud drifting over the house tonight
is the shape of an insect, a hellgrammite,
large, long, and singular, crawling through
the waters of dark sky.
Postcolonial Chicken
April 1, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry
1. Texts
“When he brought the chicken into the hotel lobby he became embarrassed, not wanting the staff to see, so he stuffed it inside double-breasted serge and went up in the lift reeking of spit-roast.”
—Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
The Post-Graduates
April 1, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry
We hung, chiefly, with actresses who read only
the highlighted sections of scripts, we understood,
better not to become too involved in narratives
that might not love us, we derived great pleasure
Basta
April 1, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry
On Being a Vine
April 1, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry
By RAE PARIS
for my niece, who got the part of a vine in The Secret
Garden at her predominantly White school
Your worried face wonders if you can do this. How does
a vine think? What does it feel? Do vines own hearts,
and if so do they beat fast or slow? What about souls?
Tiny Sun
April 1, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry
I always hide behind my hair, even when I don’t have hair. I disappeared
inside my shaved head, identity de facto of college, coming out. Camouflaged
in plain sight, a faux reveal, ersatz openness of skin & neck.
Storm
April 1, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry
By WILL SCHUTT
I
After a shower I fill the tub with water, stick fresh candles into candlesticks and brace each heavy planter in the yard. From the rain guard gutter I rake leaves. Watching the sun press through shuttling clouds, I see there’s no such thing as reprieve without broad damage. Electricity comes and goes, yellow leaves circulate in clusters, treetops contort. The dissonance is too like the news, external hysteria masking an inward calm that moves it, a wave of pictures uploaded to iPhones, the opposite of poetry, which prepares the long confusion for its shape.
Midnight, and people I love are dying
April 1, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry
and I can’t sleep so I’m up thinking
too hard scribbling these words in the dark
because the physics science news I read
before bed is making me crazy now
with incomprehension—it makes
no sense to me that gravity should exist,
what I know about is love:
