You can’t carry your talent with you like a suitcase.
Don’t you dare mail us the love your life denies;
Do you really know what you have done?

read more in the current issue of Salmagundi

FISHWYFE

BY MARIE-CAROLINE MOIR

That notion, sweetheart, ocean eyes,
is an assload of mawkish bunk.

What we got here are fathomless shallows,
legions of ‘em.
Jacques’s five-fingered special: rien.
The Cousteau cop-a-feel: merde, le même histoire.

Here’s nothing but the salty truth:

Every disease ends in yellow.

&

There ain’t a bone in this port
big enough for my wishing.

What a drag-ola my empty net;
there’s nothing here I can’t resist.

Poet and Salmagundi contributor Henri Cole writes from Paris in his blog, “Street of the Iron Po(e)t: A Paris Diary,” at The New Yorker.

You can read three of his poems in issue #168-9 or in Touch, his latest book.

Here’s the opening of Fosl’s essay along with the redacted document reproduced in his reply to Justman:

On the hot, clear afternoon of June 5, 2005, US Army Col. Theodore S. Westhusing, after meeting with private contractors and a few colleagues, retreated to room 602A of the trailer where he’d been temporarily billeted near the Baghdad airport. The day’s meetings had been unusually tense and difficult, their aftermath even worse. There alone, at some point during the next few hours, in that 10 by 38 ft space containing little more than a bed, a bathroom, and a small desk, after scrawling a note to his commanders and family, Westhusing placed the barrel of his Beretta 9 mm pistol behind his left ear and blew his brains out.

“It’s taken years of unscientific tests, but I now accept that there is such a thing as literary allergy. . . . I have always felt well disposed towards the widely acclaimed David Foster Wallace, whose latest novel, The Pale King, was published two and a half years after his suicide. But I am allergic to his writing.”

Cover Art from Sigmar Polke courtesy of The Brandhorst Museum

If last night’s debate left you less than fulfilled, why not sink into some real thinking about this American moment from the pages of our new pre-election issue: Peter Fosl on American Despair, James Miller on Progress, Martin Jay on Neo-Liberalism, and Patrick Keane on Recurrence and Returns—plus new poetry, fiction, and columns.

The poem is everywhere. Your voice
sometimes travels beside it
like a dolphin keeping company for a while
with a golden sloop in the sunlight,
then vanishing again.

Here’s a photograph of Seferis and a link to an interview with the poet from the Paris Review:

http://bit.ly/J4HFf3

We’re reading with great pleasure and profit Rick Moody’s rich and varied new book of essays on music, the title essay of which first appeared in Salmagundi and was chosen for Best American Essays.

We can recommend, among many worthwhile offerings, the investigation into The Who’s Pete Townshend and the subject of child abuse which is deeply humane, generous as well as unsparing, steeped in the music and the best thing we’ve ever read on this artist and his band.

And the way the title essay moves from, say, a theological/moral close reading of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sparrow” to the divorce of the author’s parents from one paragraph to the next gives some sense of the range in play throughout the volume.

Here’s a sentence, as insightful as it is wry and heartbreaking, from the section in that essay called “Heaven and Premium Stereo Equipment”: “My parents had this new stereo system, in a big wooden cabinet in the living room. It was a hi-fi, in the classic sense of the term, and it was maybe the expensive hi-fi that they bought to convince themselves, through amplification, that they were more allied and resilient than they were.”