Proud as I am, Michaela, proud as I am / Of my eyes’ blue in yours, your hand in mine…
Read MoreIf I take my grief to the beach And scan my blurred reflection…
Read MorePortrait of Gertrude Stein, Félix Vallotton, 1907 by Daniel Bosch Gertrude Stein exploited every freedom in language she knew about and when she reached the end of her list she invented some more. Gertrude Stein set many of the best passages of her writing into extremely deep and confusing labyrinths such that when I read…
Read MoreOn April 6, 1327, in Avignon, in the Kingdom of Arles, an Italian scholar named Petrarch saw and fell for a young girl named Laura.
Read Moreby Daniel Bosch In memory of Joseph Brodsky 1 Horizontal Babel, Your high-pitched hex Hums in the grunting thrust Of this plane leaving LAX. Over the palm-lined, blue Pacific Cruise ships proud as banks Wink as I look down On the land of the swank. Oh, to be over America! Where flight attendants’ prose Lulls…
Read MoreWhen it comes to the photograph’s translation into language, shouldn’t the elements of such a speechless photograph have a literal and figurative priority over my “speech”?
Read MoreYang Mu’s verse autobiographical prose, like his verse, relies on close observation of Taiwan’s landscape, flora, and fauna for imagery and metaphor. Yet if the humidity, the light, the tang in the breeze—the embodied experiences of the young Yang Mu—are distinctly Taiwanese, his themes are broadly human.
Read MoreThe camera sees what a 17 year-old boy sees when he stands where a path meets a paved road at the edge of a dirt farm.
Read MoreAfter virtue, under the eye of the clock,
Patterns of culture in our time, our bodies
The last gasps of the American revolutionary spirit were choked out in the Civil War, when the most conservative form of liberal government ever invented unhinged its jaws and swallowed its antithetical self, the South, whole — only to have to regurgitate some of its bones, of course, every twenty years or so since 1865.
Read Moreby Daniel Bosch The Invention of Influence, by Peter Cole, New Directions, 120 pp. In his six-page introduction to The Invention of Influence, Harold Bloom writes that Delmore Schwartz and Peter Cole share “the gift of almost never writing badly.” Bloom’s praise seems backhanded to me because on the one hand Bloom himself possesses no…
Read Moreby Daniel Bosch In Iowa City, in a jail of corn—taller than you are and more tasseled— live out your sentences. In Iowa ice, in the dark of its aquifers, live out your sentences, with the rising sun your warden winking like meter on the floundering plains and glazing the dullest park bench in Des…
Read Moreby Daniel Bosch Against a black background, part of the face of a fair-skinned woman. The tone and texture of her skin. The curve of her lips. Especially the black of her eyes — as if we could look through her. All these exceed not only what we expect to see when we begin to…
Read Moreby Daniel Bosch “There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable— a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown.” —Sigmund Freud So many tourists have touched the Botero’s dick It gleams like a ship’s brass bell, Its patina circumscribed by an adoring public.…
Read MoreDambudzo Marechera. From cover of Moving Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st Century, edited by Julie Cairnie and Dobrota Pucherova, 2012 by Daniel Bosch Years ago, reviewing Dambudzo Marechera’s collection of stories and poems, The House of Hunger (Heinemann African Writers, 1978), I called him the Zimbabwean Keats. I don’t want to…
Read MoreWilliam Pope.L is famous for (among other things) carrying a business card that identifies him as “The Friendliest Black Artist in America.”
Read MoreTwo Arts Are you at a loss? Why not get a Master’s? Hundreds of programs are filled up with intense People like you, each class as good as last year’s. You’d have to write, that way. You’d grow to trust your Teachers and peers, to whom you would make sense. If I were at a…
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