“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.”
“Your dreams hold your days together.
You spend your time transforming stars into
kitchen implements that you could bake potatoes in.”
A review of Lisa Olstein’s Lost Alphabet, by Lynne Potts
“Imagine that you have entered a universe of moths—say, a faraway place where day after day, season after season you study the movement, habits, life and death cycles of moths. If you can imagine doing so, you will have entered the world of Lisa Olstein’s Lost Alphabet. You will be in a strange place where you can’t quite get your geographic bearings—and you will be consumed by the essence of moth-ness.”
“Now that the documentation of your life is notarized,
Birth & Death certificates time-stamped,
Now that your most recent draft is abandoned,
The primitive ’60s swallow tattoo on your left forearm will transform
Into a hummingbird, thumbnail-size, so as not to be overstated. . . .”
“And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the Polish president’s plane went down, killing everyone on board including the president and several high-ranking members of the government. In the wake of the many tragic aspects of this crash . . . I got to thinking about something I’m always thinking about although I sometimes wish I wasn’t: chain reactions, train of thought, stream of consciousness, karma. The maddening, the obsessive, the endlessly entertaining connectivity of things and what that has to do with telling stories.”
“My father came to me in a dream
to walk with me around a stadium.
Not wearing the jaunty motley of his last months:
the patchwork newsboy cap and paneled shirt
he wore when tearing around town,
smoke streaming from the car window.”
Congratulations to AGNI poet Tomas Tranströmer, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature!
“It was a funeral
and I felt the dead man
reading my thoughts
better than I could.”
A review of Bragi Ólafsson’s The Ambassador by Erin Gilbert
“When we read as consumers we are consuming a product; but reading a novel like The Ambassador requires us to look at literature the way my father looks at ferries—to see an ingeniously designed, carefully constructed assemblage of parts, an assemblage that is good and valuable because it functions so well.”
“In [Williams’s novella], he has a created a character mostly us, a man who is little more than a pastiche of voices, searching and failing to find an authentic self. Phong Nguyen’s debut story collection, Memory Sickness, also deals with race and identity. But here identity, once firmly intact for these characters, is jarred loose and set adrift, often by memory and their relationship to Rhode Island, the tiniest of states and home to some of the country’s biggest oddballs.”
“Brian Gresko: Do you have models in mind when you begin a project? By models I mean works that influence your writing.
Jonathan Lethem: . . . I’ve come to believe that there is something innate in my method, my sentences, and my approach to narrative and characters that’s inalterable, and that transforms these influences even when I’m not conscious of it. So I don’t ever think in terms of embarrassment or hesitation or reservations about being influenced or working with models.”
“Sharp chop
Of your uncle’s cough clocks the hours; your sister’s
Washing, the rush of your thoughts. Morning is nine
Glass bangles hoisting sacks of sugar
From the floor. I’m not talking
About a place, but a country. . . .”
“O never was there vestal more demure
than ardent, pleasing she who urges
carnal lures with such schemed subtlety
to keep a peek discreet. . . .”
|
The New England Poetry Club hosts AGNI:
On Monday, March 5, 2012, at 7:00 p.m., the New England Poetry Club hosts a reading by AGNI contributors Karina Borowicz, Len Krisak, and Jennifer S. Flescher. Harvard Yenching Library, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Mass. Free and open to the public.
Rachel Swearingen’s story “Mitz’s Theory of Everything Series” (AGNI 74) has been chosen for New Stories from the Midwest 2012.
Kathleen Hill’s story “Forgiveness” (AGNI 73) will appear in The Best Spiritual Writing 2013.
Congratulations to Robert Boyers, whose essay “A Beauty” from AGNI 74 was awarded a 2011 Sidney Award by New York Times columnist David Brooks.
As its Prose Feature next week, Poetry Daily will reprint Askold Melnyczuk’s essay “Beating Toms,” which appears in AGNI 74. On November 21, PD featured Kevin Ducey’s “Ewigkeit” from the same issue.
Three pieces from AGNI have received Special Mention in the 2012 Pushcart Prize anthology: Idris Anderson’s poem “A Correction” (AGNI Online), Matt Donovan’s poem “Elegy with Mistakes All through It” (AGNI 71), and Paul West’s essay “Lightning-Rod Man: The Migraine Headache as Heuristic Tool” (AGNI 71).
On September 20, Verse Daily reprinted Kate Northrop’s poem “Cat,” which originally appeared in AGNI 72.
Three poems from AGNI appear in the new volume of The Best American Poetry: Julianna Baggott’s “To My Lover, Concerning the Yird Swine” and C. K. Williams’s “A Hundred Bones” from AGNI 72 and Lee Upton’s “Drunk at a Party” from AGNI 69.
Two stories from AGNI 72 have been chosen for Dave Eggers’s Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Homing” (part of The AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction) and Joan Wickersham’s “The Boys’ School, or The News from Spain.”
Phyllis Barber’s essay “The Knife Handler” (AGNI 71) is cited as notable in The Best American Essays 2011 and The Best American Travel Writing 2011.
Do you know about the author pages at AGNI Online? They form a massive repository of info on contemporary literary writers. Click on any writers’ name.
Tom Bissell’s “A Bridge Under Water,” from AGNI 71, is reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 2011, where Majorie Sandor’s “Wolf” (AGNI 71) and Joan Wickersham’s “The Boys’ School, or The News from Spain” (AGNI 72) are cited as other distinguished stories of the year.
On November 21, Poetry Daily featured James Pollock’s poem “Northrop Frye at Bowles Lunch,” originally published in AGNI 72. Carol Moldaw’s essay from the same issue, “The Bottom Line,” was PD’s Prose Feature of the Week starting on November 23rd.
Two AGNI stories have been selected for Chamber Four’s The C4 Fiction Anthology: Michael Mejia’s “The Abjection” (AGNI 69) and Scott Cheshire’s “Watchers” (AGNI Online). The collection is available for free download in several ebook formats. Chamber Four calls AGNI one of the “best places to read online.”
Two AGNI pieces have won Pushcart Prizes and will be reprinted in the 2011 anthology: Valerie Vogrin’s “things we’ll need for the coming difficulties” (AGNI 69) and Ravi Shankar’s “Barter” (AGNI 70). Two essays, Mimi Schwartz’s “When History Gets Personal” (AGNI 70) and Emily C. Watson’s “Still, Sky, Girl, and Marriage” (AGNI 69), plus Adam Day’s poem “Combine” (AGNI 69), were given Special Mention.
|
Krasnoyarsk
