Title: Mercury tea
First published: 1988
Description: The title itself relates to the Mad Hatter and the famous tea party in ALICE IN WONDERLAND.  Fashioning hats in those days meant that you ingested mercury, used for treating the hats, and, thus, hallucinated.  These poems are in a both playful and deep sense hallucinatory and visionary. Like his earlier poems, these are marvelously cryptic, playful and original.  At his best, Trachtenberg aims for something where sheer lyrical beauty wins the reader over.  The result is a special irony built of polarities and tensions between a lovely sound and problematic subject matter.  In this stanza, writing is seen as an almost effortless private dance:  "The sound of morning sparrows. A glance opens white shutters, defines the objects around....Words move, rise, and scramble, leaping on this page."
Subjects: American poetry, Gay poets
Places: Surrealism, United States
Time periods: 20th century