Alum Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) takes her place this summer as the 40th resident poet in Robert Frost’s home. Rose will live in Robert Frost’s home on 158 Ridge Road for six to eight weeks this summer and will give featured readings at The Frost Place’s Conference on Poetry and Poetry Seminar, as well as at Dartmouth College and other venues in the region.
An interview with Rose and poems appear here.
Two poems by alum Daye Phillippo (poetry, ’14) appear in the Adirondack Review:
Perspective
Across three brown fields and as many roads,
a round white barn and its square white house,
the barn, thimble-sized from here. Above these
the sky going on and on for miles, the way
Winslow Homer in the French countryside,
painting Cernay la Ville perhaps en plein air, his sky,
summer blue and cumulous, most of the canvas.
Continue reading online…
Two poems by alum Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) appear at Beltway Poetry Quarterly:
There is a Balm in Gilead®
This red one’s twice a day to even out
your heart; the white one’s only once a day
for kidney and the yellow just once too
for your liver because the big horse pill
of three meds in one—beware trinities—
brings a mitigated kind of healing.
Continue reading online…
Alum Lynette D’Amico (poetry, ’13) interviewed fellow alum Robert Thomas (poetry, ’02) about his new novel Bridge. The interview appears in Fiction Writers Review:
Lynette D’Amico: You’ve previously published two books of poetry, Door to Door (Fordham University Press), Winner of the 2002 Poets Out Loud Prize, and Dragging the Lake (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series). Some of the sections in Bridge were previously published as poems— “The Gift” and “Catchy Tunes” were in Poetry—did you originally conceive the project as poetry?
Robert Thomas: I think for me there are really two questions: one is poetry vs. fiction, and the other is poetry vs. prose. It’s actually hard for me to remember how I originally conceived the project, but I know the first draft was prose. That doesn’t necessarily say much about my conception, though, as I’ve often written first drafts of poems in prose. In fact if any poets are suffering from writer’s block, I think one strategy worth a try is writing in prose. I’ve always found prose liberating even if the final version of a piece is in verse.
Continue reading online…
A short story by alum Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ’02) appears at Hollywood Dementia:
It wasn’t just a job you left but a way of life. Lunches at a certain grade of restaurant expensed, and many colleagues and celebrities. It came to Jeffrey that he had been fired from the collective us, a place of order with its numbered parking spaces and assistants purchasing his favorite pens, to take on the solitary I. I am by myself, he thought many times afterward. An unemployed entertainment attorney in a town full of counsel. I am no longer negotiating for either side.
His first day unemployed he rose at his usual time of 4:30 AM, put on workout clothes and went to the gym. His trainer was waiting. Trainers were part of the style. Trainers also cost a thousand a month. The gym itself was five hundred a month which included valet parking, unlimited sweat towels during the workout and little bottles of water to maintain proper hydration during exercise.
An interview with alum Rick Bursky (poetry, ’03) appears at the Pine Hills Review:
It seems like you’ve done everything. You’re a poet, a photographer, a director, a producer, a playwright. Is there one specific genre or medium you’ve always dreamed of working in that you haven’t yet touched?
Years ago, I wrote a play, Prayers for the Invisible Men. It was performed in an off-off-Broadway theater. Once was enough for that. And the truth is, it was a poem that really go out of hand. There was also a time, years back, when I thought of writing a screenplay. Hey, I live in Los Angeles. But I came to my senses. Los Angeles doesn’t need another screenwriter.
I sometimes play with the idea of writing creative nonfiction about poetry. I have a manuscript titled Ironmongery. In that book, I explain everything in the world. For instance, I have a short piece about fog. Most people will tell you fog is a cloud touching the ground. But I tell the truth about fog—it’s unresolved poetic thought. Yeah, I better stick to poetry.
Continue reading online…
Two poems by alum Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) appear at The James Franco Review:
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This hangnail: the good sweet ouch of a small
tearing without thinking here on my thumb;
a deep red line creeps circling the dull nail,
a dark slow-welling of blood running down
and around the nail bed. Should it sizzle,
should it smoke a little above the tip
of my left thumb; sulfurous devilry
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Shadab Z. Hashmi (poetry, ’09) appears at Ink Knode:
Qasida of the water pipe’s gurgle on a starry night
Midnight alley, the poet watches jinn silhouetted
in pursuit of jinn on slim ledges of balconies—
secrets leaking like watered-down ink—
In the walled city, a bone-biting winter night
never comes without the witness of coal,
brass pots and the nightly haleem cooked
by the same Mughal family for generations
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Fay Dillof (poetry, ’15) appears in Shadowgraph Quarterly:
Now trees, that tree,
part dead, part red, where plums,
who knows when, the seasons exploding
into one another, will form
and then it’ll be
a competition: squirrels v the height
we reach on chairs. And the heart
is not the pit but the hard bite
Continue reading online…
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