Robert Schultz has received an NEA fiction award and VQR’s Balch Prize for Poetry. We Were Pirates: A Torpedoman’s View of the Pacific War comes out this spring from Naval Institute Press. He teaches at Roanoke College.
While visiting the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a former Khmer Rouge prison camp in Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh, Binh Danh studied closely the mug shots of former prisoners. Danh, a Vietnamese-born artist whose family fled to a refugee c [...]
David was talking, slowly and with concentration, choosing his words carefully, sometimes haltingly, as he did when he was trying to get something right. I couldn't remember how we had gotten onto the subject of Spain. Mary had told a story about a [...]
Where on the spectrum of living fire
Do a man and woman walk this morning
Through woods above a shallow river
Late in March? In winter they dozed
And smoldered coolly, or flared inside
Like ice on skin, a flame that numbs.
The grass lay matted and bl [...]
Afternoon like a crystal box: pine trees,
citizens, rising clouds
in shining cases.
Finches dart through walnut branches,
through scissoring light,
specimens perfect, air like glass.
But I'm all e [...]
Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930. He grew up in Washington state and in Portland, hiking the woods and sometimes logging in them. After a brief early marriage, the Reed graduate interspersed work on a trail crew in Yosemite with study [...]
Asleep in our lives, we wandered out
With trowel, lantern, and yellow dishpan,
Digging ferns in the hilly woods.
We imagined only a corner garden
Shaded in pines, as spring in the trees
Tipped quickly toward summer,
Afternoon sliding hard toward dusk [...]
Any attempt to assess the situation of contemporary poetry immediately encounters the inconvenient absence of an avant-garde. It is not possible simply to check the progress of the dominant movement—or even the two or three most advanced "school [...]
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As we step toward the perfect Antarctic,
Green at first, but deliberate in our hatred,
Which keeps us marching, we are struck
After every kill by the spots of red
On the snow, by the splash on porcelain.
Red, which seems so impossible, wrapped
In t [...]
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