FEATURE
December 2006

Willis Barnstone


THE CORTLAND REVIEW

E
SSAY
Tony Barnstone
  "A Manifesto on the Contemporary Sonnet: A Personal Aesthetics"
Tony Barnstone considers the sonnet from its formal beginnings to its evolution into the twenty-first century, including some generative techniques for sonnets of your own


S
ONNETS
Tony Barnstone

Willis Barnstone
Lorna Knowles Blake
Kim Bridgford
Billy Collins
Leisha Douglas
Barry Ergang
Ross A. Gay
Soheila Ghaussy This marks an author's first online publication
Miranda Girard This marks an author's first online publication
Myrna Goodman This marks an author's first online publication
Susan Gubernat
Heidi Hart
Jay Leeming This marks an author's first online publication
Anne Marie Macari

Patricia O'Hara
John Poch
Michael Salcman
Patricia Smith
A.E. Stallings

Gerald Stern
Joyce Sutphen
Jeet Thayil
Meredith Trede This marks an author's first online publication

 

Willis Barnstone's recent books are The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets (New England, 1996), Life Watch (BOA, 2003), Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho and The Gnostic Bible (Shambhala, 2006), and The Restored New Testament (Norton). His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, the Times Literary Review, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and Paris Review.

Light    Click to hear in real audio



Light is my end. Born when a few cells fuse
in a big bang of love, from nothing I
become a mass living in time, and lose
my black aloneness for the unseen eye
of mind catching you. We two think and burn.
Back in 1905 Albert Einstein,
a clerk in the Patent Office in Bern,
found we electromagnetically shine,
which means that I am charged with being me,
discharging like the sun. And when my mass
and time slow down to zero gravity,
dismembering me to be infinite night,
Albert's mc2 tells me though my ass
will disappear, I shall turn into light.

 

 

Willis Barnstone: Poetry
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