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A Private Letter

By Michael Symmons Roberts Essay

A Private Letter A Poet on Writing for Composers NOT LONG AGO, I was giving a reading with another poet who has written libretti for composers. I hadn’t heard anything of his musical collaborations for a few years, and asked him if he was still working in the opera world. “I’m doing something for television,”…

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Portrait of the Psalmist as Ultra-Singer

By Michael Symmons Roberts Poetry

I sing for fear I’ll hear the still small voice and not like what it says. I croon to make my skull full as a squat hive and the honey is my cracked song, my sting in the throat. O I know a bee is not a melody but I must come to terms with…

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Rare Sighting

By Michael Symmons Roberts Poetry

Because the crab apple tree is not incarnate, but a shape cut from sky, you simply pull its trunk a little wider and step through. Once on the other side, you turn, take stock, lean on a bough, and look back at it all. So strange to catch your own life unawares, to see your…

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In Cutaway

By Michael Symmons Roberts Poetry

Stands me, though it could be any of us, sliced open, scalp to instep, en pointe in formaldehyde inside a glass case like some macabre Houdini stunt. This may be a fin-de-siècle end-of-pier show, a sicko’s private gallery, a future museum of mortality—I’d be the last to know: dutiful sentry in cross-section, everlasting witness to…

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