somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond any experience,your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look will easily unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always…
The Fish I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn’t fight. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like…
( ) death I cause I result in breaking heads along the highway. burial as it fits between transit. buttons make time stop and shirt buttons make time not work for me faulting clothes to shame physics. time as a round thing I fumble to break our paradox meant to save to leave machines. each…
Digging Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills…
Spring Smells of Lilacs Early spring is, famously, cruel. The bite of winter is still sharp, even “whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote” (“when that April with his sweet showers pierce the drought of March”). Chaucer’s famous opening lines of the Canterbury Tales emphasize…
Wild Geese You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world…
WELCOME TO NATIONAL POETRY MONTH AT GWU ENGLISH! The first National Poetry Month was in April 1996 and was started by The Academy of American Poets as a month-long celebration of poems. In April 1996, I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago when my poetry professor, Elizabeth Alexander, tasked her students with creating…
Professor Marshall Alcorn’s book Resistance to Learning: Overcoming the Desire-Not-To-Know in Classroom Teaching was published in September of this year by Palgrave Macmillan. Resistance to Learning has already received high praise and is the latest in Professor Alcorn’s works that focus on education. As our semester was winding down, GW English Communications Liaison Samantha Yakas asked him…
Professor Antonio López appears in the latest edition of “The Chronicle Review” for The Chronicle of Higher Education, reflecting on a number of recent scholarly publications on Cuba and race, focused especially on the situation of Afro-Cubans. Readers of this blog are already well-acquainted with Professor López’s work in the field, as his own eagerly-awaited…
Here is some news from our British and Postcolonial Studies Cluster, where some faculty have been publishing new research and forging exciting institutional connections in the US, UK, India and Ireland. Jenny Green-Lewis is glad to say that her essay on Victorian photography and the novel, written for the new Oxford Handbook of the Victorian…
