Each Wednesday, Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor this week is Aaron McCollough.
[am startled at times that the 1 whom I am]
Friederike Mayröcker
Translated from the German by Jonathan Larson

am startled at times that the 1 whom I am
speaking to is not there, yellow and red elongate
leaflets from the robinia tree waft to the ground, then
through the side alley into the BÜRGER CAFÉ, reading with
blossoms and clouds, o Jesus your blood who can
save me, covered with oaks and sparse pine-trees, this
hasty goodbye you hurry to the car the stones of Sifnos with
blue-green brows while the cut-flowers razor-
sharp in the prairie, the rock-hard mnemotechnic, art of recalling,
automatized reciting dressing and undressing reading, drip
dab onto the asphalt or my grating
steps. The kitchen window open wide my brain
in the hollows of my knee, breathing heavy

 

10/15-16/04

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Photograph of writer Howard Norman
"My 42-Year Correspondence with W.S. Merwin"

Writer Howard Norman looks back on a life-long friendship: "Just last week I discovered something in William’s letters...It is all about prescience and foreshadowing, I suppose, it is perhaps also about how the unconscious mind auditions a thought, a locution, a line of poetry."

via LITERARY HUB

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Kaveh Akbar's handwritten translation into Farsi of the final three lines of "katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet."

"When I found harris's poem, I saw myself, I saw the midwest I knew, I saw my own disregard for the interiority of others, I saw my own sloppiness. It’s a poem that performs its own searching, too—you hear the speaker reworking their language, endlessly reprocessing their positions and complicities."

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