The Fears - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kevin Prufer's recent books include The Art of Fiction, Churches, and How He Loved Them, which was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. His work has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and the Poetry Society of American and appeared on “best of the year" lists in The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, BookList, and others. Prufer has also edited or co-edited many volumes, including New European Poetry, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentary, and Literary Publishing in the 21st Century. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where he co-directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing great but little-known authors to new generations of readers.

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A Body of Work

One comes, eventually, to the realization

that one will leave behind only

a body of work that will grow increasingly

unintelligible to each new generation. A trace

will remain spread across the vast

internet in much the way certain particles

inhabit the emptiness of deep space—negligibly,

though perhaps measurably. I, for instance,

am childless and, therefore, most likely

will die alone, my nest feathered

with yellowing poems. One comes, eventually,

to the knowledge that one's children

are increasingly unintelligible, being yellowing

poems spread across the emptiness of deep space—

negligible, though they once seemed, in their way,

to breathe. For instance, I am alive, right here,

in the middle of my poem, having had, perhaps,

too much to drink. One comes, eventually,

to the certainty that one's body of work

is nothing like another man's progeny, being

made of language which can only veer

toward emptiness as years become empty space.

For instance, hello? I am calling out to you,

folded here between the pages

of generations. You don't know me, but once

I was particulate and alive. Now what am I?

from The Fears

He had become fascinated by the way

excellent poems sometimes failed to hold together

in ways he expected them to.

That is,

a poem, like a great mind at work

on an unsolvable problem,

might by necessity

meander, might come up against

a bad image or a wrong idea,

might turn down a particularly dark passage—

a frightening passage—

only to be confronted

by an unexpected crumbling