Two images, or perhaps memories, conjoin at the source of this piece: the first from Chris Marker’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece, La jetée (The Jetty), constructed almost entirely of still photographs; the second, my wife, Cathy Simon, scattering her brother’s ashes in the form of a spiral at the site of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake (which is tidal). The poem takes off from there, invoking lovers, invoking Smithson, invoking the fires that have become virtually omnipresent as part of our new reality during climate change (the coming apocalypse?).
Maybe I should add that thirty-two “Midnights,” all written late at night during the COVID-19 lockdown, form the third and final section of my latest book, "Little Elegies for Sister Satan." It seemed a good time to receive “visitors.”Michael Palmer on "Midnights: La jetée" |
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"Kaveh Akbar Finds Meaning in Misunderstanding"
"Akbar is exquisitely sensitive to how language can function as both presence and absence. In his most recent collection, Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf), words assume physical, palpable form—as reverberations in the mouth and ear—but can just as easily take on a spectral aura, reminding us of worlds and selves no longer within reach."
via THE NEW YORKER |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Brian Teare on Taylor Johnson's Inheritance
"Restless, improvisatory, Johnson favors no single subject matter or mode. They are a poet of theory and memory, of essay and anecdote, of ode and aubade, of self-portraiture and landscape, of deconstruction and sex. Their poems are rangy in form–prose, erasure, projective, epistolary, ekphrastic, even a pantoum and a sonnet–and equally rangy in scene and setting." |
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