Jonathan Galassi

Rating: 4.33
Rating: 4.33

Jonathan Galassi Poems

He was middle-aged which
means that the mixture of
death and life in him was
still undetermined. And
...

2.

I tried, and each attempt was a fiasco.
I yearned, but every love of mine was wrong.
I needed, and the shame was overwhelming.
I failed, and so I hated being young.
...

You were in bed.
You heard your mother working in the kitchen.
It was still light, the birds were bickering,
the waterfall behind the house was falling.
...

If your bearded friend
helps you catch the trout
barehanded
in the pool of the dream
...

The barroom mirror lit up with our wives
has faded to a loaded-to-the-gills
Japanese subcompact, little lives
asleep behind us, heading for the hills
...

Heartworn happiness, fine line that winds
among the tapestry’s old blacks and blues,
bright hair blazing in the theater,
red hair raving in the bar—as now
...

Somewhere ahead I see you
watching something out your window,
what I don’t know. You’re tall,
not on your tiptoes, green,
...

8.

The backyard apple tree gets sad so soon,
takes on a used-up, feather-duster look
within a week.
...

Now that the ticket to eternity
has your name on it, we are here to pay
the awkward tribute post-modernity
allows to those who think they think your way
...

A fool for love, an inner refugee,
sees a peacock strutting in the birdhouse
high on a branch and fanning
the broadest, most articulated fan tail
...

11.

Down the path between the apples
through the maple grove of suicides
then left at the old wall
along the wire fence to the brook-
...

Jonathan Galassi Biography

Jonathan Galassi was born in Seattle, Washington, is the President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the eight major publishers in New York. He began his publishing career at Houghton Mifflin in Boston, moved to Random House in New York, and finally, to Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He joined FSG as executive editor in 1985, after being fired from Random House. Two years later, he was named editor-in-chief, and is now President and Publisher. Galassi is also a translator of poetry and a poet himself. He has translated and published the poetic works of the Italian poets Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale. His honors as a poet include a 1989 Guggenheim Fellowship, and his activities include having been poetry editor for The Paris Review for ten years, and being an honorary chairman of the Academy of American Poets. He has published poems in literary journals and magazines including Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, The Nation and the Poetry Foundation website. Galassi graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy where he became interested in poetry, writing and literature, and from Harvard College in 1971. He was a Marshall Scholar at Christ's College, Cambridge. He realized while attending Christ’s College that he wanted a career in book publishing. Galassi was born in Seattle (his father worked as an attorney for the Justice Department), but he grew up in Plympton, Massachusetts. He lives in Brooklyn and is married to Susan Grace, and they have two daughters.)

The Best Poem Of Jonathan Galassi

Middle-Aged

He was middle-aged which
means that the mixture of
death and life in him was
still undetermined. And
all of a sudden he took
an unwarranted turn—impul-
sive, convulsive. As in
those nineteenth-century
plays where the roof gets
blown off the convention-
al house and the audience
is left to gape at the
heroine bareheaded—him.
He has a gift for self-
serious hyperbole and he
resorts to it regularly
to describe and explain
his behavior. Not that
anything happened. But
he stared into something,
an abyss or a garden, and
now in the aftermath he’s
more alone than before.
He has not been forgiven,
not that he wants to be.
What he wants is to know
what he saw, that it wasn’t
theatrics. But that’s
hard to achieve, things
being what they are, the
others implicated being
themselves. So he walks
in circles and wonders
and kicks at the leaves.

Jonathan Galassi Comments

Lopamudra Mishra 04 May 2015

you are a brilliant poet.

0 0 Reply

Jonathan Galassi Popularity

Jonathan Galassi Popularity

Close
Error Success