Teaser quote: “In early 1872, Edward Lear left a poem unfinished. It was very nearly complete: all it lacked of its intended five rhyming subsections were two lines and two words (not at the end). Lear left blanks in the manuscript, and it’s clear he intended to supply the missing bits at some later time. No one knows why he never did so.”
Teaser quote: “Get ready for this. I, unlike you, have read every word of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906)—and read it recently. And it gets better. I, at the cost of an ocean of labor, have cherry-picked the seventy-four best bits out of the approximately three thousand billion trillion entries, and I am going to give you those seventy-four: yours, free of charge, to judge and find wanting.”
Teaser quote: “The jing in Beijing is a different jing.”
for Full Stop.
Teaser quote: “Kiṣkindhākāṇḍa” makes a series of intolerable dad-puns on “didgeridoo” whose grating unfunniness must have amused their author but is not contagious.
At the Paris Review Online.
Teaser quote: “Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well it’s seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That’s a shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.”
Teaser quote: “With so much happening at the level of pure form, the technical aspects would be tedious to parse. But if you think of the way Celtic designs carry curving lines from one quadrant of the visual field to another while maintaining qualities of symmetry and balanced value, tracing exquisitely detailed involutions and mandala-like circularities, then you’ll have some sense of Madrid’s analogous acoustic embroideries.”
Teaser quote: “Did you know Fanny Howe started her writing career producing soft-porn romance crap for Avon Books—? Out there in the world somewhere is a paperback from 1964 called West Coast Nurse. It was, I learned, part of a popular “nurse” series. There’s a copy online for $40 (original price: 32¢). Somebody needs to buy that and review it for the Agni blog.”
Six volumes, every poem he ever wrote. Thanks, Adele and Sandy!
In the Spring 2017 print issue.
Teaser quote: “Download the PDF version here. If you would like a hard copy, please request here or via Facebook.”
Teaser quote: Reminds me of a joke Samuel Johnson alludes to in the preface of his edition of a certain Very Big Poet, whose greatness was (Johnson asserts) not to be found in particular passages but in the overall effect. The joke was: “He who tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house for sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.”
In the Paris Review Daily.
Teaser quote: “The people of France have made it no secret that those of England, as a general thing, are, to their perception, an inexpressive and speechless race, perpendicular and unsociable, unaddicted to enriching any bareness of contact with verbal or other embroidery.”
In Blackbox Manifold, Issue 18.
Teaser quote: “The light must change. The waiting person wait longer. The walker must step out of the summer heat wet to the hair roots, the shirt wet.”
https://www.semcoop.com/event/anthony-madrid-try-never
Teaser quote:
Written under the spell of an old Welsh poetic form, the poems in Anthony Madrid's second book, Try Never, unite the freshness and speed of children’s clapping games with the witty and cynical aphorisms of medieval gnomic nature poetry.
In the Paris Review Daily.
Teaser quote: “Any English-speaker could recite every one of these twenty-eight poems backward, under any conditions, including hanging upside-down, drunk, on two hits of acid.”
Teaser quote: “Why would a goddess steal a hunchback’s sheep? and naked?”
Teaser quote:
INTERVIEWER
But let’s not get distracted. You’re essentially saying you can access memories from past lives. Is that correct?
THE NEANDERTHAL
Yes. I mean, that’s misleading to put it that way, because these “past lives” were not me. It’s not like my personality existed forty thousand years ago. But I can access, I’m convinced, personalities and events that occurred at the time when the Neanderthal species—as a distinct thing—ceased to exist.
On the Paris Review Daily.
Teaser quote: “In 1948, T. S. Eliot got up there at the Library of Congress and gave an address so witheringly condescending to Edgar Allan Poe that I felt angry reading it. What do I care about Edgar Allan Poe? Yet I felt angry.”
In the Paris Review Daily.
Teaser quote: “Some days I made four or five limericks, or four or five versions of the same limerick, texting every one of ’em to the people in my life who, in my judgment, did not then and do not now deserve God’s mercy.”
In the Brooklyn Review.
Teaser quote: “When he took me out with his people, you could see he was ashamed of me. The next youngest guy there was twenty years older than I….”