NOTES
75 NOTES “After de Tocqueville”: The opening quotation and a few details were borrowed from William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain. Robert Frank: “When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read the line of a poem twice.” The poem is dedicated to Charlie Bassett. “Letter to Shara in Amman”: The italicized passage is from Hart Crane’s poem “A Postscript,” as it appears in Complete Poems of Hart Crane (Liveright , 2001). “Self-Portrait as David Lynch” is for Mark Warburton. “In My Name”: “The Predator War,” by Jane Mayer (New Yorker, October 26, 2009), inspired this piece. Other source material came from The Bombing of Hiroshima by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts. “Akhmatova’s Ashtray”: The final two lines are from Anna Akhmatova’s “The Last Toast,” translated by D. M. Thomas, as it appears in Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006). “Green Fields”: Irish ballads, especially “The Green Fields of Amerikay,” influenced this poetic sequence. “The Legend of St. Brigid” was reconstructed from chapters in Lady Gregory’s Book of Saints and Wonders. “Descendancy ”: In order to spite landowners who planned to evict them, nineteenthcentury Irish cottiers often burned their own homes. The “Running Brush” poems gesture toward the Japanese prose-poetry genre zuihitsu. Thanks to Kimiko Hahn, whose book The Narrow Road to the Interior brought this form to my attention. ...
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