Charles Simic’s Come Closer and Listen: New Poems will be published next year.
They had already attached the evening’s tears to the windowpanes. The general was busy with the ant farm in his head. The holy saints in their tombs were burning. One of them, flames and all, was the prisoner of several female movie stars. Moses wore a false beard and so did Lincoln. X reproduced the Socratic method of interrogation by demonstrating the...
In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ‘Just a Smack at Auden’: What was said by Marx, boys, what did he...
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