Each day I attach less value to the intellect. Each day I realize more clearly that only away from it can the writer possess something of our past impressions, that is attain to something of himself and to the one subject matter of art. What the intellect gives us back under the name of the past is not it. In reality, as happens with the souls of the departed in certain popular legends, each hour of our lives, as soon as it is dead,...

Elaine Sexton I am for a poetry that makes nothing happen. I’m for a poetry that is too young to date, but too old to overlook. I’m for a poetry that wants to paint. I was thinking of those huge paintings by Francis Bacon at the Metropolitan last summer. There must have been about fifty of them. I was thinking of the colors, the wide open space in them, the intensity of their shapes after the stun gun of subject matter. I was looking...

…the sign on the corner building read, beside which a street light arched like a back and two tangueros strode across the cover of the leather-bound journal that was to be my first purchase in Buenos Aires. “Little road or journey,” it signifies, though the flight to South America is not diminutive. Distance is not the point, Proust says, of travel, but that discovery in oneself of other eyes. One looks and looks, agape at the...

Of course, my shrink was two tables over watching me through the whole dinner. Not that he meant to. In fact, he probably was trying to avoid looking at me, as I was him. I did feel a bit like putting on a show, though, so I laughed often and tried to contribute as much conversation as I could with my friends. We talked about the word schnitzel. How attractive it was and how someone had to order the pork schnitzel just to say it. And...

I have just begun listening to PodLit, a podcast sponsored by Creative Nonfiction. In Issue #10, editor Lee Gutkind interviews Amy Stolls, NEA Literature Program Officer. Literature is the only NEA discipline to give individual grants. The other individual fellowships—in dance and music, and the performing arts—were cut in 1995 by Congress. Literature remained, according to Stolls, due to writers lobbying for their merit. While the...

Jascha Kessler It is the polity that forever confronts the spiritual company I call The Tribe of the Poets. Future historians will doubtless look back upon the Twentieth Century as an interregnum, a period typical of an uncertain transition from the disintegrating order of one civilization to that of a still-embryonic, coalescent society, whose proper order remains for the future. Such periods of agony are often a mixture of glory and...

Townsend Walker My parents must have evolved from frogs. Frogs seldom form families or care for their offspring; they just mate and jump. It took me twenty-three years to have a family; my brother Jack never did; and my sisters married Jesus. I was born in the middle of a snowstorm in New York City, January 1913. My father left us in 1914. Didn’t come home one day. Deserted my mother, Jack, Elizabeth, Arleene, the baby, and me. My...

Josh Mitchell The recent news of Al and Tipper Gore divorcing after 40 years of marriage has sparked a national conversation on matrimony, a particularly resonant topic for me at the moment. You see: I’m on the other side of the spectrum. I am getting divorced after a mere eight months of saying “I Do.” Despite the brevity of my union, it still hurts like a dart to the heart and I am extremely embarrassed. With that said – I can...

Tom Matlack There’s a gash under my left eye, my right thumb throbs like a son-of-a-bitch, and I keep seeing stars. My whole body hurts. I have a red beard—if you can call it that—after a week of uneven growth. On the plane ride home from Florida to Boston, people look at me like I’m some kind of pirate and wonder where the patch is for my battered eye. After all, at 45, I’m too old for this. I’m thinking back to my college...

Sam Linden When I was eighteen I began to carry a condom in my wallet. I can’t recall where I got it, because I had a paralyzing fear of buying them. This anxiety extended to bringing it around with me. I imagined someone going through my wallet, pulling it out and giving me a skeptical look. “What’s this?” they’d ask. “Optimism,” I’d cleverly reply. They would chuckle and give me a you old rogue look...