Darkness, my sibling,
I have a story to tell you
Last shabbes I was chased by the law into Bed
Stuy streets for passing out pamphlets
decrying America’s uncles.
un/bodying/s
Poetry by TODD HEARON
Music by GREGORY W. BROWN
“I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true”
Geoffrey Hill, i.m., 1932 – 2016
1. The Meeting of the Waters
Sempiternal waters, sing-
ly sing, gush glottal-less & all
onomatopoetical your
triphthong’s liquid pluraling
through rock & ruck & rill
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 08 contributors Antonio Monda and Ian Bassingthwaighte read and discuss their stories “Am I Speaking to Hyman Roth?” and “Reichelt’s Parachute.”
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 08 contributors Ishion Hutchinson and Jonathan Gerhardson read and discuss their poems “Trouble on the Road Again,” “Vers de Société,” and “Shy Mother.”
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 09 contributors Masha Hamilton and Lori Ostlund read and discuss their stories “God’s Fingernail” and “Leaving Walter.”
At The Common we’re welcoming spring with new poetry by our contributors. (Be sure to listen to the audio link to Megan Fernandes’ “White People Always Want to Tell Me…,” read by the author.)
TOM FELS interviews ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
In May 1965, Amherst College student Tom Fels ’67 interviewed three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Archibald MacLeish. The below interview, conducted at MacLeish’s home in Conway, Mass., is adapted from their conversation, a portion of which originally appeared in the town newspaper the Amherst Record.
Archibald MacLeish, one of the best-known American poets, playwrights, and public intellectuals, was born in Illinois, and educated at Hotchkiss and Yale, later taking a law degree at Harvard. After participating in World War I, he forsook the life of an attorney to focus on poetry, making his living for several years as an editor of Fortune magazine. Under President Franklin Roosevelt, he was for five years the Librarian of Congress, and later, during World War II, an assistant Secretary of State. After the war he taught at Harvard for thirteen years before taking the position of Simpson Lecturer at Amherst College (1963-67). MacLeish was the author more than fifty works of poetry, nonfiction, and drama.
Tom Fels is a curator and writer based in southern Vermont. His work in the arts includes exhibitions at the Getty Museum in Malibu, CA, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, as well as numerous articles and books. He is the author of two books on the 1960s, Farm Friends and Buying the Farm. Fels met Archibald MacLeish after the poet’s delivery of his convocation speech at Amherst College’s Frost Library in 1963. This interview was the first of many that have played a part in Fels’s writing and research. Among the latest is a conversation with MacLeish’s fellow former Harvard faculty member Daniel Aaron in The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture (June 2013).
Listen to a recording of the interview here, or scroll down to read.
By TIMOTHY LIU
Her hands kept on
working their way
into my pants even
after the wedding
toast—the evening
merely an excuse
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 08 contributors Daniel Tobin and R. A. Villanueva discuss their poems “The Origamist” and “Pareidolia.”
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