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Articles by Mark Jarman
Poet, Lucky Poet: The Poems of Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney may be the last modern poet to take Dante for a model.[1] Though Heaney, a Roman Catholic of Northern Ireland, is thought of as a natural heir to the Anglo-Irish W. B. Yeats, you don’t find him listening to the traditional ballad as Yeats did, but like Yeats and other great Modernists he attends the cosmic and literary vision of the Medieval Italian genius Dante.
Smash and Grab - Quill and Quire
Mark Anthony Jarman (Muhammad Al-Digeil) The first line of “The Bailiffs Arrive with Their Grey Eyes,” the last story in Mark Anthony Jarman’s latest collection, compares the incidents about to unfold to “some forgotten folk tale.” It’s a particularly appropriate categorization, given the author’s penchant for linguistic extravagance and tilted perspectives. It’s also somewhat paradoxical, coming as it does at the start of one of Smash and Grab’s more accessible pieces.
Book Review | The Hudson Review
It’s hard to say just where we are in American poetry these days. But it is clear that poets, like those gathered here, have plausible theories. A world of violence appears to be mapped in each of the books gathered here. And...
Finding the Form with Mark Anthony Jarman
This story comes out of very rough notes I wrote 40 years earlier, flimsy onionskin pages I recently found in a folder when cleaning out my UNB office (an extremely slow exit). The notes were from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was at the Iowa Workshop, then Yaddo, an artists’ colony in upstate NY, then Seattle and western Canada, and traveling many roads between those very different points. Hence the jumps in geographical and geological references.
The New Quarterly
Bruno and I steered a small sailboat through islands scattered under Mount Baker, heeling and leaning out in the spray, daggerboard keel not much larger than a doctor’s tongue depressor. A rental. We beat around Belltown bars a few days, making deals, ingesting fried oyster sandwiches and peyote buttons under the Monorail.
Book Review: ‘Burn Man: Selected Stories,’ by Mark Anthony Jarman
BURN MAN: Selected Stories, by Mark Anthony Jarman Many writers are content to light one or two well-placed lyrical firecrackers in a short story. Others, like Mark Anthony Jarman, set off entire fireworks displays on every page.
Unholy Sonnet 1 by Mark Jarman | Poetry Foundation
Dear God, Our Heavenly Father, Gracious Lord, Mother Love and Maker, Light Divine, Atomic Fingertip, Cosmic Design, First Letter of the Alphabet, Last Word, Mutual Satisfaction, Cash Award, Auditor Who Approves Our Bottom Line, Examiner Who Says That We Are Fine, Oasis That All Sands Are Running Toward. I can say almost anything about you, O Big Idea, and with each epithet, Create new reasons to believe or doubt you, Black Hole, White Hole, Presidential Jet.
Vanderbilt authors, works highlighted at 2023 Southern Festival of Books
by Ann Marie Deer Owens Vanderbilt University will be well represented at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word, where a significant number of faculty and authors with ties to the university will discuss their works Oct. 18–22. The 35th annual festival, which is free and open to the public, has moved to a new home at Bicentennial Mall State Park, the Tennessee State Museum, the Tennessee State Library and Archives and other locations around the city.
Volume XCI, No 17
Subscribers have access to our full digital issues. Not a subscriber? Get access today. Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in. Featuring 367 industry-first reviews of fiction, nonfiction, children’s, and YA books: also in this issue: welcome to the Kirkus redesign; James McBride, Myriam Gurba, Lane Smith, Dashka Slater; and much more subscribe The Kirkus Star One of the most coveted designations in the book industry, the Kirkus Star marks books of exceptional merit.
BURN MAN | Kirkus Reviews
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. Awards & Accolades Likes 19 Our Verdict GET IT Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2022 New York Times Bestseller Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
Mark Jarman: "Don't Go There"
Mark Jarman That’s where they make the sausage of the self. That’s why you shouldn’t go there. You shouldn’t go there because the egos are rehearsing and you would not be welcome. That’s where one slimy id after another has been turned over and you don’t want to see. You shouldn’t go there exactly because you want to see. That’s where seeing is believing and you will not believe what you see. It’s a lot of effort for very little, a waste of time, and you’ll never get back the time you waste.
Unholy sonnets | The New Criterion
I. Hands folded to construct a church and steeple, A roof of knuckles, outer walls of skin, The thumbs as doors, the fingers bent within To be revealed, wriggling, as “all the people,” All eight of them, enmeshed, caught by surprise, Turned upward blushing in the sudden light, The nails like welders’ masks, the fit so tight Among them you can hear their half-choked cries To be released, to be pried from this mess They’re soldered into somehow—they don’t know.
Little Richard by Peter Balakian - Poems
On a walk past bulldozers and trucks pouring tarmac for the NJ Eisenhower highway my grandmother said to me as we turned into a market with olive barrels, hanging meat, piles of sumac and coriander— “he shakes away my blues.” It was 1959, and what did I know about starving in the Syrian desert or the Turkish whips that lashed the bodies of Armenian women on the roads of dust. I wouldn’t have believed that she saw those things. The radio was always on the sink in my grandmother’s kitchen.
Remembering Steven Heighton
Remembering Steven Heighton By Mark Jarman I met Steven Heighton decades ago at a “Wild Writers” short story conference in Stratford, organized by John Metcalf to bring a new generation of story writers together to create connections. I guess it worked. Steve and I shot pool and chatted and he seemed very down to earth, no airs. We were not close, but stayed in touch; as editor Bethany Gibson said to me the other day, he had a way to make you feel like a good friend.
Interesting Times
Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy, the pivot of event. You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with the story’s arc: About to happen, on the verge, horizontal. You want another planet, try the moon. Try any of the eight, try Planet X. It’s out there somewhere, black with serenity. How interesting will our times become? How much more interesting can they become?
One of the Healers
When Vereen Bell died on Tuesday, August 24, I posted a notice on my Facebook page that read as follows: RIP and homage to Vereen Bell, author of some of the very best books there are on Cormac McCarthy, W.B. Yeats, and Robert Lowell. He was a friend especially to younger members of the Vanderbilt English department and did his best to bring it into the 21st century.
Walking on Water
You are here Home » Article » Making Good: Can Faith Repair the World? Matthew 14 Always the same message out of Matthew. The water Jesus walks on is life’s turbulence. He calms our trouble and lifts us up again. To walk on water? That’s what’s puzzling— that feat of antimatter, defeat of physics, those beautiful unshod feet of cosmic truth for whom the whole performance is child’s play. And unless one becomes as a little child the kingdom’s inaccessible by any route.
Reminder - Image Journal
For God is in heaven, and you upon earth. —Ecclesiastes 5:2 Don’t take your eyes off the road. Accept nothing as given. Watch where you put your hands. You’re here and God’s in heaven. Be careful where you step. The drop-off’s somewhere near. The fog won’t lift tonight. God’s in heaven. You’re here. That word you wish to say, That score you’d like to even— Don’t hurry either while You’re here and God’s in heaven. The earth says, “Take the wheel. But no matter how you steer, I’ll still go round in circles.
The Arrow Paradox
Paul Spella / The Atlantic Zeno sent his arrow flying endlessly from point to point along its arc to make a point about eternity: getting there is tricky. That’s what I think anyway, as snowflakes stall in the morning’s freezing air like seed fluff reluctant to drop anchor in the ice.
Criticism | The Hudson Review
The Going: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and The Dolphin Letters By | Book Review, Criticism In Flight from the Fugitives Among the Barbarians: V. S.
Mark Jarman: 'Memory Song'
Day after. Remembered laughter. Day before. Even score. Day of. Hand in glove. Day for night. Twilight. Night for day. Star spray. Day in. Day out. Whisper. Shout. We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com. Mark Jarman ’s latest poetry collection is The Heronry .
Remembering Raymond Fraser (1941-2018)
Raymond Fraser was a neighbour a few doors down on Shore Street; he often strolled along the river and we’d chat. Ray was one of the Montréal Storytellers along with John Metcalf, Ray Smith, Hugh Hood, and Clark Blaise, and he worried that they might be responsible for what he called “the plague of readings” that is current. Prolific and gifted as a writer of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and even tabloid journalism, he was always writing.
Longtime leader of the Robert Penn Warren Center to retire in 2019
Mona Frederick, who has played a leading role at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities since its founding in 1988, has announced that she will retire in June 2019. As the longtime executive director, Frederick has been responsible for creating, organizing and overseeing the center’s innovative scholarly programs.
Time machine by Mark Jarman
When we arrive, the future will adore us As being so much better than it expected. We went to school with thugs and contagion. We went to school with tidal waves and felons. And we turned out . Were at the future! Greeting each one of us with a wet kiss, And up until this moment, were But wait a minute. That smell of roses and that taste of wine, They may be just the opposite when we get there. Even though were better than expected, Simply because weve made it, lets be careful.
Star Light, Star Bright: Tiana Clark, MFA’17, is one of poetry’s most exciting new voices
Before Tiana Clark emerged as an electrifying new voice in poetry, before a flock of literary agents started calling, before she won a string of coveted writing awards, and before The New Yorker magazine published her poem “Nashville” to acclaim last fall, she’d been stung so badly by rejection that she’d stopped writing for an entire year.
That teenager who prowled old books by Mark Jarman
That teenager who prowled old books to find Any argument with a whiff of the Holy Ghost— I meet him again in his marginalia, Which ignored the human sweat and stink and marked Those passages that confirmed what he was hunting. There was the milk white hart of evidence. There was the hound of heaven, italicized bold, Like an angry footnote chasing it off the page.
The Stewardess Swims Over the Sea
First prize winner of the 1st Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. We are jammed together in the sky like caged rodents and I have seen it all, know everything about you, your doe-eyed 4H calf from another lifetime, the Mars bar you stole from Nancy Green’s ski jacket, the kitchen party that introduced your face to the beauty of the linoleum.
The Drunken Widower Necks with the Virgin Mary in the Trogir Cathedral Sacked by Saracens in 1123 | Brick
On the Dalmatian coast we drive by blue seas and Ottoman forts and Romanesque bell towers, past glowing shores of Byzantine tiles of turquoise and gold and over there an ancient Greek colony’s favoured swimming spot like a carved stone tub set at the water’s edge. The city of Zadar has stood 3,000 years, Skradin is more than 6,000 years old, and Croatia was inhabited 130,000 years ago. Did Viking eyes glide past these white beaches?
Lesley Choyce’s Unlikely Redemption
John Alexander MacNeil, who lives alone on the “sunset side” of rural Cape Breton, is a feisty, difficult man, a sharp-tongued crusty old Scot, but he transcends caricature or cliché. He has an egotistical rooster named Pierre Elliot Trudeau and a chicken named Margaret Thatcher and in the winter he keeps them in his house. Every election he votes for himself as a write-in candidate.
‘Seam,’ by Mark Jarman
The pain can be endured until it can’t. The therapy will work until it won’t. The light will fill the room until it’s out. The kisses halt, or should, when one says “Don’t!” And sleep will come as long as you can wait. The weavers—bird and spider, human being— are born to knot and net, a kind of fate. And every seamless garment has a seam. Where no horizon’s visible, the dawn breaks out like a flash mob, ready or not.
July/August 2006
There in my favourite bar, Legends, whose walls were plastered with photos of Theodor Herzl and that girl who sang “You Light Up My Life,” plus also an unshaven Fred …
My Parents Have Come Home Laughing
My parents have come home laughing From the feast for Robert Burns, late, on foot; They have leaned against graveyard walls, Have bent double in the glittering frost, Their bladders heavy with tea and ginger. Burns, suspended in a drop, is flicked away As they wipe their eyes, and is not offended. What could offend him?
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