All posts tagged: 2012

Why I Am Not an Engineer

By ROBERT BEROLD

thanks, frank o’hara

I am not an engineer. but I studied
to be one. those days, the ’60s, we
went to varsity in shorts and long socks and
threw paper aeroplanes in class. chem.eng.
was a tough course. the theoreticians did well
but the real engineers, the guys who drank beers
and fixed their own cars, failed.

Why I Am Not an Engineer
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Introduction

By KELWYN SOL 

 

Liberation in South Africa and the first free elections, in 1994, unleashed a social and cultural energy and sense of possibility. In the two decades since then, there has been an explosion of innovation in South African poetry, with a number of poets experimenting with fresh perspectives and themes. In a society still bearing the effects of deep division—most obviously, but not only, racial—poetry has become one of the cultural media through which individuals from previously antagonistic groups can share and explore their feelings and emotions, thereby, at times, creating bonds of mutual sympathy. At the same time, the social and political foci of pre-liberation poetry have remained but have been transformed and augmented by a number of fresh areas of concern.

Introduction
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A View from the Cheap Seats

Here at The Common we think a lot about “place,” but that’s not quite the same as thinking about where you’re from, something Sonya Chung recently mulled over in her column for “In House.” I find myself thinking about that topic pretty often, ever since moving to Western Massachusetts for graduate school two years ago. Growing up in New Jersey, twenty-five miles outside of Manhattan, New York City cast a long shadow. “The city” was as much a part of my identity as summer trips down the shore. My father, along with a majority of people in my town, commuted to work in the city every day. He would come home with his coat smelling distinctly like an NJ Transit train car: part newsprint, part stale air.

A View from the Cheap Seats
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The Way Birds Stand

By KATHERINE KILALEA

Why are you so sad, Girl, the fishermen ask.
As a colander drains, as shoes to feet,
as he who smokes will invariably say yes to coffee,

so a girl watching a group of gulls must be a soul in torment
or lack company, or maybe a rod,
the technology to stave off loneliness.

The Way Birds Stand
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A Perfect Love

By KATHERINE KILALEA

 

You are a tortoise in a hard hat.
I am a heart growing gallons and gallons of hair.

You made it with me: a perfect love,
which went hard from the softness of its innards.

And though all the love went elsewhere, you hung around,
like a gas, like sand in my bikini pants.

 

 

Katharine Kilalea is the author of One Eye’d Leigh, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for writeers under 30.

Click here to purchase Issue 04

A Perfect Love
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