Interim 21: 1 and 2, 2002

I've long known of Interim magazine and found my interest revived when I learned some years ago that Claudia Keelan, a poet I admire, had become its editor. I've picked up issues of Interim at AWP over the years and am passing through them again before I give them away (I'm reluctantly giving loads of magazines and books away on account of my forthcoming move to a new office, where I'll have 2.8m of shelf space).


white new moon
of fingernail or bright noon of tooth
where I stand where I came to stand
where I stood and had stood
longer than my life the tree leaned
over the broken

Dan Beachy-Quick, from 'Mulberry'

...a god in worn-out dungarees,

reordering the universe of dark and light with huge paint-dappled hands....

Earl Coleman,  from 'On the Day His Lease Expired'

We wanted it come to rest tied up on the craps table,

so we would feel so very money storm then.

Crystal Curry, from 'Cherries'

To free oneself

of sententious platitudes

music the ally

silence the ally

Turn to the task

turn the task

turn it

and turn it again.

*

The easy wisdom

the impossible ambiguities

gone in an instant

the complex of time

*

Not the mighty dead

with whom you are wont to wrestle

but the humble dead

who can swat you like a fly

*

Days such as these

the presentation of events

is owned and disowned continually

in the poet's search.

*

Say an idea

and its concomitant emotions

or an emotion

and its concomitant ideas.

*

Therefore the repetition

of the text or act of love

leads inevitably

to the text or act of love

So that the consolation

appears to arise

out of a certain logic

built into the syntax

Built into the body

ears, eyes, genitals

posed against death

though "Deathward we ride"

 Norman Finkelstein, from "Track"

 awaken without casting off sleep

*

                                     But the present is

not sufficiently distant for observation.

Gordon Hadfield, from 'Via Soma'

bellwether to dust's watering hole

the horses the sheep the cows the fowl

emaciate, the vultures' virtuous compass

R.F. Marsocci, from 'Badlands'

So that it does not matter

          if name sing here or not:

what is a name inside oblivion?

Nathaniel Tarn, from 'Ancestors'

Which is all to say I feel the distance between

how the mind I call 'my'

used to be then

and is now.

Liz Waldner, from 'Double Space Time'