Henri Cole, “The Mare”

I remember the shade where I found her
spent and bruised like the fallen apples.
Like them, she was full of darkness,
full of the sweetness which rushes upon us
so soon after death.
She lay there like a mummy,
like the wreckage of an ancient queen,
mild, yet locked away within herself.
It held me the long afternoon—
the secret fruit, the silken mare—
until the day had passed.
I stood and walked among the goats
with their delicate steps
and fed them apples
so mellow
the burst like hearts before the queen and me.

Pierce the Skin showcases selected poems from six collections of poems by Henri Cole written between 1982 and 2007; “The Mare” is from the oldest of those collections, The Marble Queen. Last month, The Nation published three more recent poems that originally appeared in Blackbird and Wolf; the Academy of American Poets has several more (with some overlap). You can also hear Cole read from his work on his own website. Other Cole not in this selection include “Eating the Peach” (Slate) and “Haircut” (The Paris Review).

“I favor a poetry where the soul (both the poet’s spirit and representation of personality) is not occluded by language, not perishable, and not anesthetized by ambition,” Cole wrote in 2000; more recently, he shared a reading list that included works by John Koethe, Marilyn Chin, and Louise Glück (as well as short stories by Joyce Carol Oates).

Cole will be reading this Sunday (March 14) at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

12 March 2010 | poetry |

You’re Going to Hear Me on Your (Internet) Radio

I returned to my old mediabistro.com stomping grounds yesterday, through a telephone call to Jason Boog, my successor at GalleyCat, to talk about a new book project: the publication of a print version of my “translation” of the Tao Te Ching, a work I’d been distributing for free online for the last six years. Getting Right with Tao includes a mild revision to that text, plus a new foreword and afterword and a special gift for the folks who buy it—because if you’re going to pay $9.95 for a book you could just download for free, you deserve something special, right?

Anyway, during my conversation with Jason (and AgencySpy editor Matt van Hoven), I talked about how that online version became so popular, to the point where it’s one of the first ten results you get when you search for “Tao Te Ching” in Google. We also chatted about how I ended up working with Channel V Books to do a print book after so many years of publishing this as an online exclusive, and about the impulse to do a rendition of the Tao Te Ching when I don’t, in fact, know a word of Chinese…

11 March 2010 | uncategorized |