Issue 14

The Influence of Translation and Music on Poetry (Conducted at the Meachem Writers Conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee in Fall 1996.) DH: What are the greatest influences on your work? WM: One [...]

There are only a hundred or so snow leopards alive, and three of them here. Hours I watch them jump down and jump up, water being poured. Though if you fill a glass fast with water, it rings high [...]

What you see in his face in the last photograph, when ALS had whittled his body to fit a wheelchair, is how much stark work it took to fend death off, and fail. The famous rage got eaten cell by [...]

You could say, I suppose, that he ate his way out, like the prisoner who starts a tunnel with a spoon, or you could say he was one in whom nothing was lost, who took it all in, or that he was big [...]

Two dozen bars or so into “Better Get It in Your Soul,” the band mossy with sweat, May 1960 at The Half Note, the rain on the black streets outside dusted here and there by the pale pollen of the [...]

Ave atque vale; hail and farewell dear friend. When William Matthews died on November 12, 1997, one day after his 55th birthday, writers and friends everywhere grieved that we had lost the [...]

It was the year I seasoned the backyard with salt, shaker in hand and every bird’s tail a target only to be empty-handed, Uncle Newt’s saying less than a bird in the hand or the bush till he [...]

Sweet poplar, sweet poplar, you have become golden. Yesterday you were green, a wild green of glorious birds. Today you are bedraggled under the August sky as I am beneath the sky of my red [...]

Grinding her teeth in the dark and wearing a tutu like yellowed azaleas, she waits on her side, wearing down the logic of cause and effect — the natural order, this time or next, she’ll overturn. [...]

Silent again, we begin to hear noises in our heads, swelling to overwhelm the sound of our own breathing. If we are silent for long enough, something would surface from under the wind-troubled [...]