The New Republic

When I want to think “Life can get no worse than this,” It is a lie. While I can’t begin to imagine a You Who Created This morning, through my small window I see each tree is filled with so much sun It becomes a sun itself. Leaf-light winces off the current of cars. I see my mother following behind Because she will not lose me in this traffic. Because she will not lose me. Though I let myself run lost. This poem originally ran in the March 24, 2011, issue of the magazine. READ MORE >>

Richard Wilbur, among our most distinguished living poets and a longtime contributor to this magazine, celebrates his ninetieth birthday on March 1 of this year.  As the snows of Wilbur’s western New England were slowly yielding to auguries of spring, I found myself thinking, on this portentous event, of a passage from his poem “The Event,” in which he tries to fix in words the elusive significance of a swirling flight of birds.  READ MORE >>

I am always falling in love when I have work to do. But there are other distractions, if you don’t pull through: roll of red ribbon, green candle on a crystal stand, orange cup of unground salt, violets with furry leaves. Map of the north cape with tunnel directions. And there are finer pairs than you and I would make: pale tablecloth with pink flowers, pale sky with pink sky at mountain height, brown teacup and saucer, golden honey jar and golden space between one mountain and another. READ MORE >>

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Stop me if you have heard this one before. A group of citizens are unhappy with the government. A viral communications network is born, spreading words of dissent throughout the land. The authorities crack down with a vengeance. This may sound like the story of a Twitter or Facebook “revolution” in some repressive corner of the world. In fact, it is a tale of how illicit poetry spread through the streets of eighteenth-century Paris. READ MORE >>

I love the past tense, but you can’t live there. I love the stories you believe add up to you, Though they never do. I love the way The rhythms and the tenses and the words Add up to nothing, or to a diversion, or to this: I know this place, and even think it’s true If places can be true), but what does it say? That if I wake I’ll wake up into it, and then go on? Or is it just a state of mind, a place to linger in Or stay, whose seeming is the whole of its reality? I was born to indecision: I follow thoughts READ MORE >>

Under the cliff walls of apartment blocks, on a narrow patch of grass as tough and discolored as old carpet, they have parked their motorbikes and distributed themselves, a tribe, a colony, girls and boys, some lounged on the sward, some on cement paving in a strip of shade, some on two facing wrought-iron benches planted in concrete. Out of range of grownups, they play cards, they scuffle, a girl places her head on a boy’s lap to practice kissing, they smoke, they pass lit cigarettes back and forth, a smaller boy READ MORE >>

The Bars of Atlantis: Selected Essays by Durs Grünbein READ MORE >>

He had not been denied the world. Terrible scenes that he clung to because they taught him the world will at last be buried with him. As well as the exhilarations. Now, he thinks each new one will be the last one. The last new page. The last sex. Each human being’s story, he tells nobody, is a boat cutting through the night. As starless blackness approaches, the soul reverses itself, in the eerie acceptance of finitude. READ MORE >>

He has been my sole companion, sometimes, for days and weeks on end. Prisoner No. 1 and Prisoner No. 2, making do. Yet this solitude cannot compare with his. At any time I can walk out the door—I am not about to do any such thing; theoretically, however, it is within my power. All at once I am ashamed to think that if anyone is anybody’s sole companion, I am his. And how many times, absorbed in work or trying to kick its door in, deranged with elation or disappointment, have I turned on him, responding READ MORE >>