Statement of Record
“I don’t usually define myself by one genre; however, I am a poet, a fiction writer, a hybrid writer, and a non-fiction writer, and so I claim all of those identities. I see myself ultimately as a writer who writes a number of different things, in a number of different genres, who experiments with form sometimes and who writes what she wants when she wants.”
Tosh Berman can never be separated from his pedigree—that his father Wallace was an artist of such originality and aesthetic coolness he was on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—but his father passed in 1976, and Tosh is here now and doing great work. Tosh Berman manages his father’s artistic estate...
I always want to feel some kind of intellectual searching and an emotional charge in a poem. My experience with poetry is a lot like my experience with movies. I just want to sit in the dark and think and feel. But I can admire and be made better by poems I don’t connect with or understand, too. If someone writes something and calls it, with any sincerity, a poem...
Nimrod builds a higher tower
this incarnation.
Bigger. Better. Badder.
Crows bring trinkets.
Suits shake hands.
At the Roy Chalk building
in Georgetown a staircase
circles down and around
into the belly of the beast.
A belated witness
tells what they saw, what they didn’t—
see the verses all lined up
and shot, out back, one by one;
how they fell into the lake which
was there for claiming them.
And the dog...
Perhaps you are like the rabbit
outside the fence, trembling in place,
having just escaped the hound’s
frustrated advances. You blend
We live on a graveyard arrowhead
where the Gullah battle haints and hags
and spirits of indigenous tribes
hover to claim what is theirs.
Theatrix is chock-full of trap doors, of trompe-l’oeils and mirrors. The ground is not solid; the air is not safe; the coast is not clear; the rug will be pulled out from under your feet. You feel it in your bones. Svoboda’s lines are elegant but she is equally eloquent in moving the “parts that can’t speak, or parts speaking inaudibly,” the innermost parts of our messy and...
The old comedienne moves her mouth, she does her stretches, her deadpan- without-so-much-as-a-twitch, and she times it. [It’s all about timing]. Old means she’s timed a lot [she may have timed out]. She always wakes early with perfectly useable patter that doesn’t have a story behind it. An existential joke, tailless they call it in the business.
In plain English, the question of class has to do with money. Who gets paid what for what labor. In that respect, the poet belongs to the bottom of the economic totem pole. Each poet can do his or her tallying. Do you believe that you get a penny an hour for the numbers of hours you spend producing your poems?
In classical Marxism, income...
In a cemetery, the same darkness as that between stars grows moss. Time unlocks tunnels and tunnels behind those rocks.
The Fog The fog came unpredictably as a gift (after the sticky sleep and awkward, stoic morning). I smelled toast but never saw it. The door closed and I cried a little in the bathtub. Right, the fog - Hanging over the hole where the Nets will play someday, sliding down Dean Street as a happy hour pickleback might at half-time of Germany vs. Austria. It came...
Statement of Record