According to Zuckerman
Life is the adventure of losing your way: how wise that sounds, such a reassuring anapaestic paradox, but is it true or merely clever? The adventure may…
Three Literary Limericks
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The world, both within and without, creates ontological doubt. The women chitchat. Is that fog or a cat? And what…
Two Grief Poems for Belinda
The hourglass moment: a triolet “Think of long weeks, short months. Enjoy each good half-hour”: that’s what the hospice doctor said. Think of long weeks, short months:…
Happiness: A Poem
The movies that really hit the spot have ironic, downbeat, equivocal endings. Happiness’s grand illusion is always just out of reach: Garance dwindles into the crowd; Rick…
The lecture: A Poem
I’m counting down the lectures I’ll never give again. Last week it was “Christabel,” Coleridge’s weird Gothic fragment. Did he really have a thing about lesbian sex?…
from Spiking the Canon: A Poem
Ulysses The critics give it ten out of ten, the literary equivalent of Zen. Is it Joyce’s folly or his ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’? Perhaps you should…
The Literary Life: A Poem
The future wants a story, romantic preferably. Dying young, promise snapped: that will do admirably; So, too, will suicide (cryptic note, if possible), or an overdose, a…
Grief Limmericks: A Poem
My mother is lying there dead. Memories crumble like bread. After the strokes, no more chats, no more jokes. My mother is lying there dead. My mother…
Esprit d’escalier
The Poet stretches out his long legs, looks up from contemplating his elegant, old-fashioned brown shoes, addresses the creative writing class, his voice tuned to channel charm…
A Weakness for Westerns: A Poem
Of course there’s almost everything wrong with Westerns: the term ‘Red Indian’ for a start and that, from Fenimore Cooper onwards, noble savages and/or a dying race…