“This will sound strong, Stan said after a sip of coffee, but he thinks you’re out of touch with the world around you, that you understand nothing, and that you live in a permanent state of denial. He thinks you toady up to people and grin at everybody to get them to like you.”
“Eight billion pounds of copper, three million ounces of gold were extracted there
The void left open to vivid Arizona sky”
“On Wednesday afternoon he brought my lovely from the cemetery back to me on the gray steps that descended to Charles Bridge Puppets and this time it was I whom she wished to capture in digital dots of information. Why? In my arms were not garlands or bouquets but two cardboard boxes full of my happy Jews.”
“Certainly you never
consciously sought to do harm
although sometimes
it spilled in all directions”
“Though half his nose was lost, as were three toes
and his best friend Axel, Roger was steadfast: he felt
sanguine in the afterglow of their botched ascent,
knowing that Axel would forgive him everything. . . .”
“As a child, I looped one end of a rope around my waist
and, with it, towed uphill a snow-caked sled;
my hips are sore from the weight of . . . what?
The adult responsibilities that plague my tired head?”
“The Arab Spring, a blast of the hot, Khamsin wind. Spring, I said to myself, how many centuries then did the Arab Winter last? Or was that “Spring” merely an interlude, heralding yet another ice age? But give hope its due. A Tunisian street vendor called Mohamed Bouaziz torched himself and the Middle East blazed.
Look what happened within a few months: the president of Tunisia fled; the president of Egypt sat in an iron cage; the Libyan dictator, dragged from a ditch, died of a bullet fired from his own golden pistol; and the Yemeni has just “resigned” after thirty-three years of misrule.”
“You are still wondering what you should have wondered about your ex-best friend, but you are being tough on yourself: your imagination knots up to questions of truth and the fact that you don’t always like what you learn. So, the more you think about it, you like this idea of a learning pit, as if rightness, reason, observation swirl together at the bottom of something dark, naturally obscured, no one’s fault for not coming up for clarity and air.”
“Your story “The Night Guardian of the Goat” (AGNI 74) is set in the Gaza Strip. What was your impetus for building a fictional world in this location?
On my second trip to the Gaza Strip, back in 1993, I went with the mindset of a journalist, but I returned with the desire to be a novelist. What happened was, one May afternoon, I was sitting outside along School Street in Jabaliya camp, where I was living with a Palestinian family, and I saw two boys with an injured bird and a piece of string tied around its neck. The boys would toss the bird into the air and the bird would flap its wings and fly a few feet until the string ran out and the bird would be yanked back. Watching this, I thought that it was a striking, almost prophetic image. As a journalist I could write about it just as I have told you, but by a novelist, so much more could be done.”
“In the night’s firm or
remote or close black, public stars tick light or
tick against the moonlight or
enumerate the night.
The orphan lamp. No, the lonely light.”
“Thank God we don’t have to speak anymore
to the quirky clerk with his reeling mind.
Slick digital killed his video store.
We’re giddy, viddy, streamy Netflix whores
who hate skippy discs or be kind—rewind,
and we don’t need to leave home anymore. . . .”
“We made a splendid cavalcade in our limousines, honking our ring-tone horns at stray passersby and especially at each other. At the war monument we lay red carnations in memory of our nation’s fallen heroes, though Yura and Sveta, who spoke of Pushkin like a friend, went a step further and brought a poem in a frame.
The first Katya and Sasha embraced atop the BT-7, while Andrei and Stasya took the less flammable T-34.”
“the traveler runs slick
along the horse, helps the mainsheet
stay trim, which means full, which
means movement, the line locked
in the jaws of the cleat, and the cant
of the boat reminds you of a particular
man you knew as a child. . . .”
“In the early summer of 1970, some ten years before she died, the famous writer tripped over a pink cat, fell down the stairs, and broke her hip so badly that when she was released from the hospital she had to spend some months in a nursing home out in the Maryland suburbs.”
“H. L. Hix: Your question suggests one aspect of the project for me: a change from passive to active. Maybe I would sit and wait for inspiration if I thought I were a divine emissary or the darling of the muses, but all evidence points to the contrary, so I think of poetry in fairly blue-collar terms. Part of what the obsession implies is that I ‘keep at it.’ Poetry feels to me much more like old-fashioned hard work than it does like a visitation from above. There’s plenty of ambient material, but like soil it needs to be worked if it’s going to produce what you want it to produce, or at least that’s been my experience.”
“In a clearing between two birches
were our broken pots and mildewed clothes
and I wept for the things grown old without me.”
“One winter’s snows.
Two loves I could not welcome.
A year of mostly silence.”
Stan’s Report
My Apology from the World
