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Faker

Will Schutt

I have a sensitive-looking face, which I use to advantage.
At night I take my sensitive-looking face outside
where people are gathered at tables, posting pictures
and acting out their deaths. What good are they to me
who seem so real? My sensitive-looking face glows
like a sign for the living. I want them to see my sign,
my outside face, through which all this feeling is funneled.

Will Schutt is the author of Westerly, selected by Carl Phillips for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His translations from Italian include My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti (Oberlin College Press, 2018) and Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems by Fabio Pusterla (Princeton University Press, 2023).

About Will Schutt

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The Room

I found myself in the middle of a room
I barely recognized, a whiteboard
with no lesson on it, walls
wanting for color. The hands of the clock

above the door had been removed.
And my friends had left their seats
in long ordinary rows, in rows

they’d never in their lives leave them in.
They must be waiting in the wings,
cheering me on—I could sense it.

All I had to do was pick up the marker
and draw what I remembered

of the room when the room was full.
Instead I stood there, scrubbing,

Will Schutt

2016

Italian Square

Hecht saw a hill here.
It turned out to be a vision
of Poughkeepsie:
half symbol, half memory.

And in a memorable
mostly forgotten phrase
William Dean Howells
said here lies the home of human nature.

Glück studied the moon above it
while reinventing Pavese
for the first time.
As if it were a sore subject
nettling a family, her country
remains unnamed.
Her village is any village,
her lettuces plain lettuce.

McHugh found poetry
in the silence of its statues

Will Schutt

2021

Teachers

One of them in your dream saying memory is genius.
One of them in your dream lamenting the word dream,
quoting someone in your dream, saying imagination is,
face it, more fun with others, the trick is to read someone
beside yourself, then take a long look at yourself
in the mirror and say, “You’re a genius, you’re a genius...”

Will Schutt

2019

Poems

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Faker

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The Room

Italian Square

Teachers

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