Richard Jeffrey Newman's Miscellany

More from our 2008 trip to Iran. I took this in the bazaar in Isfahan.

Knowing someone else had gone instead,
we hid, dreading the snow’s blunt precision,
its indifferent languor. Lacking strength and vision,
we led you here, watched as justice bled
into the river, called it “God’s Incision,”
but did not offer thanks our foes were dead.

What hangs around your neck will not take wing.
The sky’s clenched fist heralds a new regime.

Imagine bark as skin, ponder roots.
Interrogate the love they implicate.
Because you’re a survivor, take off the boots
you stole to walk among the dead. Don’t wait!
Learn the way before they strap your feet
into stirrups, before they press their lips
to the hollow of your mouth and breathe. The heat,
a surprise at first, will fill and lift your hips.

Lines Left on The Cutting Room Floor - December 23, 2018

Now you have to choose.
Join with what for sure you’ll someday lose
or go in search of what you can’t explain.
Embrace the ridicule you will endure
whichever path you walk. Don’t hope for more.

The poet is Tom Leonard. I read him when I studied at Edinburgh University in the summer of 1985. The poem, which I found via the poet Christie Williamson on Facebook, speaks a truth that is more important than most people even realize. RIP.

Persepolis, Iran. Taken 10 years ago. I remember being really surprised at how not merely phallic, but downright penile the sword sheaths are.

Lines Left On The Cutting Room Floor - December 21, 2018

Those rotting corpses will not breathe again.

Still, their silence speaks. Pick up your pen.

After More Than Two Decades of Work, a New Hebrew Bible to Rival the King James

This, from The New York Times is exciting news to me.

What my desk at school looks like now that the semester’s over and I’ve handed in all my grades. (That’s my office mate’s desk in the background. Remarkably, she knows where everything is.) I’m headed home.

Lines Left On The Cutting Room Floor, December 20, 2018

You’ll understand in time. For now, your peers

will keep you safe. Disclose to them the needs

you’ve shut your eyes to. No one intercedes

who doesn’t understand how guilt coheres.

Lines Left on The Cutting Room Floor, December 19, 2018

Below your bed,

the city lives its life. The acrobats

in business suits and sneakers turn and twist

from pole to pole—but look: Observe the rats!

Your lust propels them backwards through the mist.

Leave aside the mercies you’ve received.

Refuse amelioration. Place your trust

where camouflage evaporates. Disgust

will cast the longest light; the past you’ve grieved

will rise. The turning world that you believed

would always turn for you will fling your dust

among the stars, a barren wanderlust,

and then that world will stop. You’ve been deceived.

Anybody else find Tracy Smith’s NY Times essay on political poetry as unsatisfying as I did? Still mulling over why I feel this, since the work she cites is important. Just wondering about other responses. Political Poetry Is Hot Again. The Poet Laureate Explores Why, and How.

As a union officer, I inevitably learn things about my colleagues, some of them at least, that I wish I didn’t know.

This past summer, I saw an Ent in Westchester County.

More from Storm King Art Center.

Lines Left on the Cutting Room Floor - December 14, 2018

Take refuge in the withered disarray

desire’s death engenders there. Chagrin

will be your camouflage. You can’t begin

till nothing you have lost is on display.

Currently reading: The Collected Poems of Ai by Ai 📚

Sunset from my window–but not today’s. Today it was raining.

When what you have to say as a poet and writer is rooted both in your experience as a man who survived childhood sexual violence and in how feminism helped you come to terms with that experience, the politics by which you live your life will inevitably be a feminist politics.

The sky over Long Island City.

Your hunger will dissolve if you can’t cope

with animal disgust. The albatross

will disavow your neck. That way lies hope.

As long as you can prove it’s not coerced,

and you show your hands are empty when you cross,

each step you take will always be your first.

The Three-Legged Buddha at Storm King Arts Center.

My cat is not as evil as she looks in this picture, but I like how evil she looks nonetheless.

Your white, well-muscled belly compensates

for what’s beneath that pilfered wedding dress.

Or at least that’s what they tell you. Mispronounced,

your name will not survive the forced debates

they always win. Pre-empt them now. Confess!

Expose the past you swore you had renounced.