Authors: Tom Sleigh
“Proof of Poetry”
The poem is indebted to a passage from Aleksander Wat’s
My Century
.
Agni:
“Party at Marquis de Sade’s Place”
The American Poetry Review:
“The Negative”
Blackbird:
“KM4”
The Commons:
“The Eclipse”
The Cortland Review:
“ER,” “Hunger”
Five Points:
“Homage to Zidane” (under the title, “World Cup”), “Refugee Camp”
The New Yorker:
“Homage to Mary Hamilton,” “A Short History of Communism and the Enigma of Surplus Value”
Plume:
“From the Ass’s Mouth: A Theory of the Leisure Class,” “Stairway,” “Proof of Poetry”
Poem-a-Day, poets.org, Academy of American Poets:
“The Parallel Cathedral”
Poetry:
“Homage to Vallejo,” “The Animals in the Zoo Don’t Seem Worried,” “Homage to Bashō” (published, in a different version, under the title, “Six Trees and Two White Dogs … Doves?”)
Raritan:
“Valediction,” “Songs for the Cold War,” “Prayer for Recovery”
The Threepenny Review:
“Second Sight”
Tikkun:
“Songs for the End of the World”
Tin House:
“The Craze,” “The Twins”
The Village Voice:
“Dogcat Soul,” “Global Warming Fugue”
The Yale Review:
“‘Let Thanks Be Given to the Raven as Is Its Due’”
My thanks to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the generous support provided by the John Updike Award, and to Alan, Michael, and Josh for their encouragement and criticism.
Tom Sleigh
is the author of nine collections of poetry, including
Army Cats
and
Space Walk
, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; a collection of essays,
Interview with a Ghost
; and a translation of Euripides’
Herakles
. He has won the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, an Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace Fund. He is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, where he teaches in the MFA Program. Recently, Sleigh has been traveling as a journalist in Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Book design by Connie Kuhnz. Composition by BookMobile Design and Publishing Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.