Max A. Wickert (Associate Professor)
Selected Publications



Books

All the Weight of the Still Midnight (poems), Outriders: 1972

Since When (poems), privately published: 1988

Since When--Second Series (poems), privately published: 1990

Pat Sonnets (poems), Street Press: forthcoming 1999


Poems in Journals

Poetry: "Two Poems" (January, 1972); "Eight Pat Sonnets" (October, 1980); "Six Pat Sonnets" (April , 1982).

Shenandoah: "Two Poems" (Winter, 1983); "Three Sonnets from Unholy Weeks" (Winter `1983/84)

Sewanee Review: "Parsifal" (Fall, 1984)

Other poems in: American Poetry Review, Anonym, Berkeley Poetry Review, Buffalo Courier Express, Buffalo News, Choice (Chicago), Concerning Poetry, Descant, Escarpments, Hands, Klingsor, The Lyric, Michigan Quarterly Review, Presence, Prologue, Spree, Pequod, Pacific Poetry and Fiction Review, Pembroke, Street, Works, Works and Days, Xanadu,


Fiction

"The Scythe of Saturn" in: Michael Blackburn, Jon Silkin and Lorna Tracy (edd.), Stand One (London: Victor Gollancz, 1984).


Translations

(into German) Tulli Kupferberg, 1001 Wege ohne Arbeit zu leben (with Hubert Kulterer), Eröffnungen (Vienna), 1970

(from German) versions of poems by Georg Trakl in Anonym, Chicago Review, Choice (Chicago), extensions, Goliards, and Malahat Review.


Critical Articles

"Structure and Ceremony in Spenser's Epithalamion," ELH (June, 1968)

"Orpheus Dismembered: Operatic Myth Goes Underground," Salmagundi (Summer/Fall 1977)


Samples of work

Here are two poems that, I think, represent me at my best, such as it is:

NOCTURNE

Because every blade of grass
points to a star and all light
has been lent to another
world
     because wind and water
have enfranchised the swishing
of bare feet and the sleepy
cicadas
     and because now
although the road is endless
the concrete of the road ends
at your toes
         nobody knows
that a girl slips off her black
sweater in the pitch dark while
her man lies smiling and skinned
invisible even to
himself
     and only the smell
tells field mice and foxes what
shape to give unfamiliar
fright
     until night floats away
like a ghost in a garment
while morning paints nakedness
cleanly back on the landscape.


SHIBBOLETH

Let's say the overcast that has made gray
our air for years suddenly clears. The sun
comes out in a flash, triumphant. Let's say
for centuries no gentleness has won
more than a passing compliment, but now
all mankind opens yarely to the heart.
Say, though till now we've all been quick to allow
divorce, now in one glance none feels apart.

Let's say that's how it is. The sun shines and
our quarrels are the pastimes of our feeling
of solidarity. We understand
everyone with the need to be concealing
his need, though we can't force him to display it
in the one way we know, which is: "Let's say it."



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