The Wound
First, you want to light the candle. Then
I want to light the candle, to make the world
this small—at midnight. The axis
of the week one burning
thought. A little ball

of myrrh released.
I've learned each lesson

too late. What does the candle say?
"Look at me."
 

/
 

This book says, "Let it burn."
I can't love those who say
"Let it burn." I don't love
who I was. Lying down in the dark
memory of the day
to watch a video a friend recorded
with a hundred beautiful strangers
singing, "Shut it down." How fine
the line between shut
and burn.

The screen dissolves.
Cheryl is not yet home.
Accuracy without ambition
is all I can ask for
from a poem.
from the book FUGUE AND STRIKE / Black Ocean
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"The Wound" references the creative, successful organizing to remove racist developer Carl Paladino from the Buffalo Board of Education. This included bringing meetings to a standstill with song. It responds to the refrain of a reactionary at a Richard Spencer talk at the University at Buffalo (gloriously disrupted): "burn it all down." In form it follows Octavio Paz's "The Wound" and shares the title of a great Jay Besemer poem.

Joe Hall on "The Wound"
Images of Dara BarroisDixon and James Tate
"Dara Barrois/Dixon on the Lived Poetry of the Late James Tate"

"We've been putting together an audiobook, and it's been stunning to hear how beautifully Jim reads his poems from the get-go, no posing, no drama, no hesitation, you believe he means every word he says and that he’s saying them right to you."

via LITHUB
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Cover of Diver Beneath the Street
What Sparks Poetry:
Petra Kuppers on Language as Form

"In the case of 'Split/Screen,' the magic structuring principle of 'fourteen' hovered in my brain. The sonnet is a device I often use, not necessarily as a formal frame but as a couplet structure to hold against my freewrite. This offers a scaffold toward something that can spread out on the page and take up space in the world."
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