Claire Schwartz: According to the poet Marie Howe, who studied with Joseph Brodsky at Columbia, Brodsky said: “You Americans are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that...
We had to present proof for everything: My mother was born August 31, 1954. On that day inside the womb of a minute she burst from another woman’s life,
More dark than gray, but not yet quite dark entirely, the stories keep ending as if there were a limit to what any story could hold onto, and this the limit, the latest version of it, looking a lot like the sea meeting shore.
In life and in depictions of life, when is it better to look directly at instances of suffering, and when to turn away? When is looking a form of violation, and when is it a moral imperative? As the documentary image proliferates, so, too...
I’d come into the room & try to write a different ending on those anonymous walls. There was less time all the time until time changed. You know what I mean.
