1990s

“Dear Liz—” at the Shore

I’m extremely pleased to have a poem in the current issue of the Shore. “Dear Liz—” is a little love letter to Liz Phair’s first album, Exile in Guyville (1993). The poem was originally a shape poem, but it didn’t really work and so – after a few years and a few rounds of modifications – it settled into its current mode as a haibun. The allusion in the last lines is to the rock critic Robert Christgau, who must’ve written something memorable about the Rolling Stones that insinuated itself into the fabric of this poem.

Dear Liz—

you had me at ‘Fuck and Run’, your parched voice
like husks of sweet corn under a dying
August sun—Silver Queen, the only kind—all
sturm und twang, slight lisp betraying a shyness
undercut by your half-exposed nipple on the album
jacket. You drove us wild at nineteen, tired
of guys like ourselves running everything, screaming
their emo angst in our ears.

[read the whole poem at the Shore]

The Way It Was

I’ve got some deep archives, and they’re a mess. I’ve been writing and submitting poetry since the late 1990s, and this submissions sheet is a reminder of just how much has changed since then. Now almost everything has been updated to online submissions forms – Submittable foremost among them – and only dinosaur journals like the Paris Review still require you to send them a SASE. (I remember knocking on the door of their offices on E. 72nd St. in order to drop off a package for George Plimpton, on assignment for the Gotham Book Mart.) These, anyway, were my first attempts at publishing, and you can see the titles of my very first published poems on the right. It’s funny how the passage of time gives value to the most banal artifacts of our lives. Glad I saved this one.

lit mags_90s