Brett Eugene Ralph, “Emaciated Buddha”
Scarcely do we see him
lost in all his wandering,
dollop of cold rice in a dirty palm,
whatever slumber he can muster
hard won from snakes and rocks and seething rain,
the febrile congress of frogs, the unseen
unrest of insect worlds, the wind-
begotten complaints of the hunted, the haunted
creatures perishing in the dark.Like Christ in Grünewald’s triptych,
he looks like a man who’s truly spent
a lifetime nailed to a shadeless tree:
skinny arms like tired entreaties,
face like a cave, each protruded rib
a distinct refusal, once and future
beauty of the body discarded
like a murky early draft.
A few months after Black Sabbatical was published last year, Brett Eugene Ralph spoke about the collection at Murray State University:
There’s also a ten-minute video of Ralph reading some poems at the inKY Reading Series in Louisville, Kentucky. Or you could watch him singing “Grandpa Was a Hobo” or “Charcoal Gray” with his band, Kentucky Chrome Revue.
12 April 2010 | poetry |
Charles Bernstein, “Verdi and Postmodernism”
She walks in beauty like the swans
that on a summer day do swarm
& crawls as deftly as a spoon
& spills & sprawls & booms.These moments make a monument
then fall upon a broken calm
then fly into more quenchless rages
than Louis Quatorze or Napoleon.If I could make one wish I might
overturn a state, destroy a kite
but with no wishes still I gripe
complaint’s a Godly-given right.
All the Whiskey in Heaven puts together selected poems from Charles Bernstein’s previous collections over the last 35 years, from Asylums to Girly Man. It also includes “A Test of Poetry” (reprinted by the Poetry Foundation) but not “Sad Boy’s Sad Boy) (Poetry). In this video, Bernstein reads two other poems from the collection, including the one that supplies its title.
Two years ago, Bernstein called for a bailout of America’s poetry culture; four years before that, he was explaining why National Poetry Month is a fraud.
5 April 2010 | poetry |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
