Glassworks, and: Jellyfish, and: Diving for Sponges, and: Sea Interlude: Moonlight, and: Sea Interlude: Dawn, and: Sea Interlude: Passacaglia, and: Marsh Thistle

• Glassworks
• Richie Hofmann (bio)

A willet's head bobbed in brittle grass, where we foragedfor bits of brick near a half-eaten arcade, recedinginto marsh thistle. We arrived at the corner

of the glassworks, under a sloping wooden roofwhere, once, something had been paintedon the side. You put your hand against one wall,

where they stored the raw things—sand, limestone, soda, salt—all to be melted into glass, into hollow waresand windowpanes. In the heat of afternoon, humming

with insects, the smell of the salt marshes rose upin our nostrils and in our chests from the flat bladesof cordgrass in the waterlogged soil. Tight constellations

of mussels let fall their black-ribbed lips and turned to rotin the estuaries, sliding through mire,forever pulling water, sediment, wasted things to the mouth.

Have you, too, desired to be unmadein another's hands? Hard wooden tonguesstill pegged the lintels into place where we waited, unspeaking,

for something to reveal itself, as artisans had done,forever turning molten glass in the furnaces, or watchingit flatten into sheets like the salt hay after rain.

Richie Hofmann

[inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="02i" baseline-shift="floatLeft" /] "In my poetry as well as in my life, I feel pulled by competing forces: the simple and the ornate, the naked and the elegant—classical purity on one hand and extravagance on the other. I want these sonnet-like poems to quietly but intently explore, with the fractured logic and sudden turns of traditional sonnets, these tensions in life and language. They are tensions I see in the ocean, in the patterned breaking of waves on the shore, where many of these poems take place. I also hear them in Benjamin Britten's music. The 'sea interludes' included here are part of a series of six self-portraits as the musical interludes from his opera Peter Grimes."

Richie Hofmann was born in 1987. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in the Antioch Review, Southwest Review, the New Criterion, Indiana Review, Literary Imagination and other journals. A recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2011 AWP Intro Journal Award, he currently teaches writing at Emory University, where he is a doctoral candidate in English literature.

Photo by Perry Guevara

• Jellyfish
• Richie Hofmann (bio)

Pulsing in the wet sand, you felt like something human I touched.It was again the month of dying. When the crowds gathered,the stench had already risen from the tidal wash, where youand a hundred others had been dragged ashore, your flesh engorged,

tangled in dunegrass, decaying. Green-headed flies hummedabove you. Forgive me, flowerlike creature, emptying yourselfin the sand, but I can't give you form again, as I've wanted,writhing under another's hand, everything I am, seen through.

Richie Hofmann

[inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="03i" baseline-shift="floatLeft" /] "In my poetry as well as in my life, I feel pulled by competing forces: the simple and the ornate, the naked and the elegant—classical purity on one hand and extravagance on the other. I want these sonnet-like poems to quietly but intently explore, with the fractured logic and sudden turns of traditional sonnets, these tensions in life and language. They are tensions I see in the ocean, in the patterned breaking of waves on the shore, where many of these poems take place. I also hear them in Benjamin Britten's music. The 'sea interludes' included here are part of a series of six self-portraits as the musical interludes from his opera Peter Grimes."

Richie Hofmann was born in 1987. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in the Antioch Review, Southwest Review, the New Criterion, Indiana Review, Literary Imagination and other journals. A recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2011 AWP Intro Journal Award, he currently teaches writing at Emory University...