Articles

In the Shining Book it says Moses existed before he existed at first above in the spirit world and then among us like a light * child of the Blessed Holy One who is a man of war and child of the Blessed Holy One the glamorous moon divine mother and lover, this, this—light that…

The relation of a poem to time is as follows: a narrative poem travels along a stream creating white ruffles of water behind it swimming over rocks it arrives at the ocean and dies A lyric poem unlocks a door in the stream taking a deep breath it walks through the door into a big…

Regarding the vulture (karkas) it says that even from his highest flight, he sees when flesh the size of a fist is on the ground, and the scent of musk is created under his wing so that if in devouring dead matter, the stench of the dead matter comes out from it, he puts his…

HE FUCKING hated Jews, okay? He was no anti-Semite, either. Hadn’t he married a Jew, thereby becoming the progenitor of four children who, against all odds, decided, one after the next, to practice what they all called, without a trace of irony, the faith of their forefathers? All four of them married other Jews and…

The following is adapted from the plenary address given at Image’s Glen Workshop in Santa Fe in August, 2018, on the conference theme of “Telling Truths: Art, Honesty, and Community.” I HAVE WRITTEN THIS TALK as a partial alphabet: it starts with A (for art) and goes through T (for telling truths). For alphabetic languages,…

IN FALL OF 2016 I RETURNED TO THE CLASSROOM, filling in for a friend who was on sabbatical. The course was a seminar for art students, one that I had taught many times before I retired. My friend had used Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev as one of the texts, just as I…

IMAGE HAS ALWAYS embraced the idea that art often speaks better than argument, and that seems especially true in times of grief. For this issue, we’ve chosen to print a poem rather than a traditional editorial. As the Image board and staff search for a new editor, we and our community are in a state…

Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) The Book of Endings, Leslie Harrison (University of Akron Press, 2017) In the Language of My Captor, Shane McCrae (Wesleyan University Press, 2017) WHAT CAN POETRY DO that other genres cannot? What makes it unique among the arts? What territory, however small, can poetry…

YOU WERE HOLDING THE BEEF DIP you had brought to the vegetarian potluck when I met you. The potluck was the lunch hour of the day-long birthing class at our midwife’s cabin. Through the large window behind the kitchen sink I saw the snow falling heavy and wet on the woods behind her home. I…

WE WATCHED DAVID make his way slowly down the middle of the street, dragging his right leg, his right arm limp at his side. With his left hand, he reached forward with his cane and lurched after it. A plastic grocery bag hung from his left wrist. Step and drag, forward and pause, all effort…