April represents National Poetry Month, intended as a way to spread awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States. To celebrate, each Wednesday we will be taking a deep dive into both ZYZZYVA’s recent and distant past to share some choice selections. To begin the month, we present Suzanne Roszak’s poem “Surge Channel” from ZYZZYVA No. 102, Winter 2014: I imagined sea-bathers, wanting to stand above them unbuckled in the wind, my pores soaking up the smooth violence, and dive. But the water was more stabbing than they led me to expect. So instead, smaller swimmers in brighter colors […]
Tag: poem
‘Pack Time’ by Christina Olson: ZYZZYVA No. 111, Winter Issue
by Christina Olson
Christina Olson is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Terminal Human Velocity (Stillhouse Press) and Before I Came Home Naked (Ankylosaurus Press). She teaches creative writing at Georgia Southern University. Two of Olson’s poems are featured in ZYZZYVA No. 111. Presented here in its entirety is the poem “Pack Time”: In late May, the men succumbed to winter madness, shaving their heads and posing amid great hilarity while Hurley immortalized the moment with a photograph. —from Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition Who can blame them—their ship sunk in pack ice. The dark days looping like a tape reel. The sled dogs snoozing away in their dogloos. […]
‘Still Life with Cacography’ by Dean Rader: ZYZZYVA No. 111, Winter Issue
by editor
Dean Rader is a professor of English at the University of San Francisco. His most recent poetry collections are “Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry” (Copper Canyon Press) and “Suture” (Black Lawrence), written with Simone Muench. You can see him in conversation with other ZYZZYVA contributors tomorrow at East Bay Booksellers. Two of Rader’s poems are featured in ZYZZYVA No. 111. Presented here in its entirety is the poem “Still Life with Cacography”: “If some of those wonderful people had guns strapped right here— right to their waist or right to their ankle—and one of the people in that room happened to have […]
‘What If My Mother’ by Victoria Chang: ZYZZYVA No. 111, Winter Issue
by Victoria Chang
What if my mother never protested was never pro anything never probed beyond the small yard where the bees lived with their constant buzzing what if my mother matched the bees in their compliant striped dresses minding their own business afraid to wander too far from the work that paid honey afraid to wander too far from the one queen they served but maybe the bees are not just working maybe the bees make all that noise because they are hiding things because they don’t like where they live are really livid not timid not just little serfs in striped […]
Frost Bit
by Paul Wilner
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say Vanilla Ice From what I’ve tasted of desire, I’m thinking of a funeral pyre. But if you had to ask me twice, I’d throw the dice. Bring Kid Rock over for a round or two, Burn one or two or three or four, Look out for lice. Watch the backyard Barbecue glow. Orange in the night. Let’s do it twice. […]
‘Alfonso’s Shadow Gets Away From Him’ by W.S. Di Piero: ZYZZYVA No. 109, Spring/Summer Issue
by editor
W.S. Di Piero is the author of several books of poetry and essays. His most recent book, Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebook (Carnegie-Mellon University Press), will be published in the fall.
The following is his poem “Alfonso’s Shadow Gets Away From Him” in its entirety. You can read two other poems from W.S. Di Piero, as well as an interview with him conducted by Andrew David King, by purchasing a copy of 109 here.
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Obsessions: Our Solitary Fancy
by Will Howard
Who wasn’t obsessed by the Beat Generation in high school? Okay, it was just unbearable punks like me. In Jack Kerouac, I saw a reflection of my ineloquent angst. I used to be able to recite entire paragraphs of On the Road, but I’ve since blocked all of it from my memory. I was particularly interested in Allen Ginsberg because, like me, he was unpretentiously pretentious—or at least we both tried to be. He might allude to a Greek myth in a poem written on acid. A surfer boy reeking of weed, I used polysyllables that made my classmates’ eyes […]
Three Poems for Inauguration Day: ‘I Used to Be Much Much Darker’ by Francisco X. Alarcón
by me
On the occasion of Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day, we would like to share with you three poems from our early volumes—poems we believe speak to values that will be very much challenged by the incoming administration.
“I Used to Be Much Much Darker” by Francisco X. Alarcón (who died last January) appeared in ZYZZVA No. 3 (Fall 1985). A playful even jovial poem, it tells, in English and in Spanish, of the speaker’s love of self, of reveling in his “darkness”—something others would deem unworthy of celebration. Indeed, as the speaker plangently notes: “but anyway/ up here ‘dark’/ is only for/ the ashes:/ the stuff lonely nights/ are made of.” Yet it’s the poem’s indefatigable cheerfulness—could we even call it optimism?—that remains with the reader.
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Three Poems for Inauguration Day: ‘Snake’ by Sherman Alexie
by me
On the occasion of Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day, we would like to share with you three poems from our early volumes—poems we believe speak to values that will be very much challenged by the incoming administration.
“Snake” by Sherman Alexie appeared in ZYZZYVA No. 77 (Fall 2006). In the poem, a driver recounts the accidental running over of a bull snake. But what is really being recounted is how the speaker takes responsibility for the creature’s body, and how respecting the dignity of others, and holding oneself to account for actions that affect them, is akin to holiness.
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Three Poems for Inauguration Day: ‘Justice Without Passion’ by Jane Hirshfield
by me
On the occasion of Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day, we would like to share with you three poems from our early volumes—poems we believe speak to values that will be very much challenged by the incoming administration.
“Justice Without Passion” by Jane Hirshfield appeared in ZYZZYVA No. 12 (Winter 1987). In the poem, the speaker observes a friend’s son practicing the piano, noting “he is like a soldier or a saint: blank-faced, and given wholly/ to an obedience he does not need to understand.” Perhaps, the poem suggests, justice rests in understanding when obedience is merited, that justice requires us to be aware if we are only playing “for playing’s sake.”
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‘Poem for Noguchi’ by Matthew Zapruder, ZYZZYVA No. 108, Winter Issue
by me
Matthew Zapruder is editor-at-large for Wave Books, the poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine, and an associate professor in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College. Next August, his book Why Poetry? will be published by Ecco. Two of his poems—”Poem for Noguchi” and “Stari Trg”—appear in the new issue of ZYZZYVA, which you can get here.
The following is “Poem for Noguchi” in its entirety. You can hear Zapruder read from his work, along with ZYZZYVA contributors Kathleen Alcott, Scott O’Connor, and Ella Martinsen Gorham, at the Winter Issue Celebration at Diesel in Oakland on Thursday, January 26.
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‘Hotel Bar’ by Ruth Madievsky, ZYZZYVA No. 106, Spring/Summer
by editor
Ruth Madievsky is the author of the collection Emergency Brake (Tavern Books). She is also a doctoral student at the University of Southern California’s School of Pharmacy, and a research assistant in an HIV clinic in Los Angeles.
Two of her latest poems appear in Issue No. 106: “Wind” and “Hotel Bar.” (Madievsky has been published in ZYZZYVA before. Her poem “Poem for Spring” appeared in No. 103.) Her work, as described by Maggie Millner in an interview with Madievsky, forces “a dialogue between her romantic and clinical inclinations and suggesting the body’s dangerous propensity for betrayal.” “Hotel Bar” could be seen as an example of that. Here it is in its entirety. You can read that poem and “Wind,” too, in Issue No. 106, which you can order here.
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