Jon Thompson teaches at North Carolina State University, where he edits the international, online journal Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and the single-author series Free Verse Editions. He is the author of The Book of the Floating World and After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing. The poems published in this issue are from a work-in-progress reflecting on landscapes in American film.
To Feel the Wholeness of the World (Cool Hand Luke)
The sun writes in his Book, a sentence of heat & light heat & light. Righteousness in the scald of days. The grass is singing, to the sling blades swinging, the grass is singing. To feel the wholeness of the world about you: that’s the only thing. The only thing, Boss, I...
The Unregenerate, Who Once Wanted to be Redeemed (Chinatown)
A film about a town by Robert Towne. A film about a town within a town, Chinatown. A film partially about a Los Angeles scandal in the early part of the 20th century (the story of the nefarious 1908 Owens Valley “rape” and the scandalous San Fernando Valley land grab by speculators)....
