The Best American Poetry

With the Sun [by Mary Gilliland]

Want more shade? Want more sun? A plant demonstrates its answers—via height or sturdiness or angle of inclination. About the spring ephemerals, though, there’s no need to worry the question. They emerge when trees are bare of leaves.

The thing about bulbs: they are easy to plant and, when conditions optimize for new growth—the slant of sunlight in the spring, its rains—their green shoots rise, “conspiring with the sun,” then bloom year after year—and multiply. Descendants of my mother-in-law’s handful of Narcissus poeticus, the poet’s narcissus aka pheasant’s eye, number in the thousands all over not only our land but friends’ gardens all over town. 

In September and October after a day of contact-intensive teaching, I would spend an hour or two planting yet more bulbs, recovering some of the energy expended on one-to-ones with college students. Gardening helped me keep faith with poetry until in my late thirties I heard about places that give writers residencies. Were the poems penned in my tired off hours worth pursuing? Seems so. The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown invited me for 7 months. I put my job on the line. I had to skip my annual Cornell ritual of enlarging John Keats’ “To Autumn” on the copier at the fall equinox and taping his poem to my office door for the season.

Once the ephemerals have bloomed and their foliage finishes doing its thing, their above-ground parts disappear. You can walk over the spot and never know that, below ground, life has stored its feast of chlorophyll until next year’s spring thaw. They sleep in summer and through the winter—the snowdrops, corydalis, virginia bluebells, daffodils….

Was Provincetown a dormancy for me or an emergence from? I think the latter. My dormancy as a poet was self-induced (family and ethnic background prolonged the tendency). My long off-season at FAWC reset my priorities for when to work, and how, and why.

On campus the following autumn, a former student spotted me on the quad. How was I, where had I been? Did I know that when students from my creative writing seminar saw each other, they’d sometimes nod meaningfully, lean in, and intone (he was leering now, loving the rhythm): “And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep/steady thy laden head…”? Apparently my ecstasy in class about enjambement was forgotten. No matter. They remembered Keats’ words.

Yesterday I stood up from weeding the gooseberry patch and paid attention to a long-term hunch: that I’d been fastening my kneepads upside down. I tried them the other way, cushiony part over kneecap, thin part below. Squat-kneeling again, the back of my knee was no longer working the velcro loose as it bent. This sort of thing also happens writing a poem. There, too, it can take several years to realize your hunch. The hours don’t count. I don’t count the hours.

My new collection, by a poet who did made her way back to Ithaca, will zoom launch via Odyssey Bookstore on November 9 at 7 PM.
                                                                                                        —MG, 26 October 2022

NEVER CEASE [by Mary Gilliland]

Persist, I say, fellow poets: if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. Here we are—making protest—or praise—or revelation—while others devote themselves to making war. In a world out to maim, kill, and discourage the sensitive, how does gardening steady my head?

I plant baby giants: dawn redwood! and the cucumber magnolia and tulip poplar whose 80’ leafy canopies will shade someone well after I take my last walk-away. The gardens around the house and in its woods, which for decades were bless-my-mess, are coming together now. My marriage is (almost) past the days when my husband would see me still out there and call: “Anyone would think that weeding is your spiritual exercise!” The life and art of insight! outdoors we expand: felling dead trees, clearing brush, dividing the perennials—over time.

Once-upon-a-times that we have lived are brought to mind by some featured plants. An enjambement of sorts, of our reincarnations, our reinvention of selves that are somehow also continuous. Fast growing Metasequoia, dawn redwood, the only one of its species that can prosper through the winters of NewYork State’s Finger Lakes, recalls the trees of Muir Woods that as we married we believed would live near us the rest of our lives. The only other time that I’ve heard trees and their earth breathe like those was on blotter acid—Skinner had handed these to us the spring when we housesat Kitkitdizze for Gary, the tabs printed with a double vajra—that we dropped in Minnewaska State Park Preserve while the mountain laurel was blooming, the spring after we drove back east from California.

The native tulip poplar, Liriodendron tulipifera, can be spotted here and there throughout our watershed—if you look way up. Not a common tree but unmistakable. Its large creamy blossoms remind me of magnolia and it’s a lucky walk when one turns up fallen on the forest floor. Three years ago I discovered that an actual magnolia variety could survive along with us! from the wildflower specialist at Cornell Botanical Gardens I brought home a grown-from-seed cucumber magnolia, Magnolia acuminata, that will someday flower in May. Not as fragrant as the North Carolina magnolias that lined the street where we lived when Peter was in grad school, any more than our northern vines of the same name might overwhelm us with such scent as Greensboro’s jasmine. But as the Irish say, it’s the same but different.

The whimsy and wistfulness of autumn is truly here when saffron crocus rises from the ground. Following weeks of the tinted varieties, now we are seeing the white. In Ithaca, these are the blooms that during our “[S]eason of mists and mellow fruitfulness” that convince the bees “warm days will never cease,” evidenced in this week’s adjoining photo.

Of course I’d like most of all to have a Handkerchief Tree, in order to hold close by me my most favorite city London. But the stock that gave rise to the rare specimen near Kenwood on Hampstead Heath is South African. Would it be too much to ask friends who know so much more about plants than I to find a representative variety that can withstand zero Fahrenheit??

Planting an eventually towering trees takes 10 minutes. Hundreds of hundreds of 10 minutes have been required to restore the century-neglected grounds around them, labor that infuses into even the most stubborn head gentleness and confidence. I sow seeds, keep no maps, wait for nature. How many times have I bent to unknown flora that pop up: Want more shade? Want more sun?
                                                                                                        —MG, 19 October 2022

LATER FLOWERS FOR THE BEES [by Mary Gilliland]

I garden at the end of a one-block cul de sac. This area bordering the woods is classified on the municipal maps as vacant land. Yes, it’s poetry. The gardens are anything but decorous, or planned. Strays are welcome. Wild volunteers turn out whimsical or handsome. Some alight of their own volition, or via bird droppings (the enormous blackberries!); other seeds I pocket on my trail hikes and plant when I get home. A tall sedge with seedheads large as three ears of wheat jammed together. A low-growing tuft of a sedge, with spindly stem and tiny-star seeds. The average sedge—which I’ve multiplied and transplanted so thickly that it composes two mini-lawns; they don’t mind the tread of feet, and never need mowing.

The fluffy seeds of White Snakeroot were once riders in my pockets. What is the name for darkest green? This is the color of snakeroot’s leaves, and they are heart-shaped with a very tapering point. Creamy clusters of  florets form large cottony flat-topped hats on the 3-foot mature plants. I encourage them, transplant them—here, then there—for years, but they never come to much. Suddenly, 2022 is a mast year for white snakeroot: a 50 foot long drift behind the dead-hedges in the newish sanctuary that my husband and I call Back East. I can no longer give snakeroot away to neighbors who see them everywhere already!

Boneset is cousin to snakeroot. But boneset’s umbel is even cottonier, and its leaves are lances, and perfoliate: it looks as though the stem is growing through the leaf itself. Boneset leaf magic, though, is the fact that there’s not one but two leaves involved around the stem—joined, and opposite each other. I love the late summer/fall bloomers, and these two species are thoroughworts. Where did that family of plants get its name?

The plants are always teaching me. At the base of Glastonbury Tor in the Vale of Avalon, my mind was turned from growing vegetables to growing flowers. In the Chalice Well garden, I reached down through magenta blooms to soft as lambs-ears silver-grey basal leaves and wondered whatever could this creature be. The plant is now a mainstay on the land I cultivate. I can’t tell you its name, for somewhere along the line a wrong name got recorded in the grooves of my brain.

                                         I garden in the shade on rock
                       transplant mullein, trellis pokeweed
          The bulbs for this place
are a tall order

The 9-page poem that holds those lines garnered compliments from editors but never a publication. Poets despite best effort may assume multiple magazine rejection means not good enough. But ‘Among the Trees,’ its title referencing Genesis 3:8, does reach print as the centerpiece of The Devil’s Fools, and Cynthia Hogue wows me, takes me by surprise, with her jacket comment highlighting this poem. My new book’s manuscript was a finalist in 2001 for NPS andcetera; its assemblage and re-assemblage ever since resembles the bricolage of gardening around my house. Last spring, Codhill Press selected my manuscript as not finalist but winner.

Now my husband will no longer have to keep the promise I extracted: to have Finalist carved on my tombstone. We think of poetry publishing as so scarce these days. But I’ve just learned that Harcourt picked Elizabeth Bishop’s first book from 800 manuscripts entered in a contest! With my mother’s mother I descend from midwife and iron welder who shipped to Philadelphia from the hunger roads of counties Mayo and Roscommon. Persist, I say, fellow poets: if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

                                                                                                    ——MG, 12 October 2022

Steady My Laden Head [by Mary Gilliland]

The hours don’t count, I don’t count the hours. This is not a task but an activity. Unassigned. A practically involuntary part of the day, sowing itself in my unconscious during times I might not be physically involved. I’m winging it, without formal education. It looks like I have chosen to engage, but really the chooser was something larger that said Do.

What is done is admired by walkers on the South Hill Recreation Way, both people I have met before, and people I will never know. A couple with their dog stopped along the trail while I was weeding not far away, uphill: “When we see these flowers, every year, we know that spring’s really here!” This was during the era of my corralling Garlic Mustard by—every autumn—laying down Dame’s Rocket seedheads on areas among the trees where I’d weeded out G-M. Yes, “like a gleaner [I did] keep/steady my laden head across a brook”—the freshet, that is,
behind our shed, that by this time of year is a dry streambed. My strategy was to replace the invasive with a secondary invasive, one that blooms more prettily and at first glance looks like phlox. A place holder.

The scent of hesperis matronalis rises in the evening. The flowers bloom pink, mauve, white, purple and, sometimes, an eye-catching white streaked with one of the other hues, or vice versa. Those I would mentally note to let stand through the frost. The seeds matured, then I deliberately scattered them in new areas in order to multiply the striated enchantment. Which, last year, I discovered is caused not by genes but by a virus. Was it nature or culture that brought me the next-door neighbor whose PhD research focused on plant-virus interactions? Lizzie studied host and pathogen as they co-evolved; my brassica species, Dame’s Rocket, hosts turnip mosaic virus—resulting in variegated color in the flowers.

Turning the rocky hillside acre into a garden began with an earlier next-door neighbor’s retirement. He was of the tribe who trim every blade of grass to the same length, edge the sidewalk and allow no chipped paint on trim or siding.“Mary,” he asked after once more perfecting his holdings, “would you mind if I took some of those privet bushes out of your woods?” When purchased, our house had been closed in by invasive privet and Japanese honeysuckle, up to every door. By the time Walt posed his question, there was some green lawn, my husband’s joy. I imagined the clearance would lead to lovely walks in our very own wood after a day of teaching. But the cleared land was, next spring, thickly carpeted with a mystery plant. Helped by a few students, I pulled them all out. They returned. Pull. Return. And again. GarlicMustard had just begun its inexorable march across the Lower Forty-eight.

Hence the mass plantings: of deer-proof perennials that spread. Not so many rocket now, but cowslips, hellebore, brunnera, primrose varieties (including
Wanda!), pulmonaria, trachystemon, comfrey, andcetera, follow spring’s explosion of flowering bulbs, ephemeral pink corydalis, Virginia bluebells.

I garden at the end of a one-block cul de sac. This area bordering the woods is classified on the municipal maps as vacant land. Yes, it’s poetry.

                                                                                ——MG, 5 October 2022

Egyptian Poetry [translated by Susan Brind Morrow]

Editor's note:  Susan Brind Morrow published a translation of The Song of Baramhat by Salah Jahin in The Seneca Review, Vol XVI, 1; p.93in 1986.

Morrow included her translation of Salah Jahin’s The Song of Baramhat immediately followed by her translation of the Egyptian New Kingdom hieroglyphic poem The Invocation to a Scribe her book The Dawning Moon of the Mind, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015, p.278-79)

1970s

Songs of Baramhat (

Salah Jahin

Baramhat is the first month of spring in the Coptic calendar, the calendar of ancient Egypt still in use today, along with the Islamic and the Gregorian. The most notorious months are Amshir (February/March) which is characterized by inescapable sandstorms, and Tuba (January) which is bitterly cold. The poem follows the progression of the year from midsummer (Abib, Melaoon) during which time it is often too hot to go around in the day time. Tut (toot) is September.

Sucked through the ribs 
Like milk from the breast
Unceasing, but not by a child-
Tears give way to blood
Give way to fire
Give way to words-
Red, resounding, terrible…
So the strength of the sun in summer burns out sweat.
And I-
My breast
Is a bronze fortress
That scorches the eyes
The heat increases
And melts its lock
And passes.

                  *

Malaun in all the books is silence,
Malaun in all the books is dumb.
The silence of branches webbed tight by spiders
Though horses trip through them.
Bright delicate birds sing,
They chirrup out their lives.
And I…
My heart is another bird
And if it doesn’t sing it dies.

                     *

Oh sweet wind, the month of Tut,
The lock of summer is melted and gone.
Fly away over the roofs, my heart,
To the house without ivy or jasmine,
To the mother of the eyes 
The eyes with hard words and sad smiles
And say to her,
“Oh friend to those who wander
Your friend who has loved you 
year after year has returned.
And by life- a night of longing,
By dawn and those who cannot sleep
By morning and those who hope
By noon and those who sweat
By evening and those who are tired
By Maghreb- and what is it
But a punishment for madmen?
Do not abandon a friend
Who was never false
And never- though love was lost
Cried out-
And never said, “But I…”
May the earth and sky be my witness.”

And around the shanties and the hovels,
Heart,when you go
Don’t go as a nightingale or as a bat-
Go as what you are,
A heart
With a thousand eyes 
and a thousand ears
And a thousand thousand tongues.
Crawl on your belly on the pavement in the dust
And if it is the cowardly month of Tuba, the brutal,
Listen and see what rises in the wind,
Oh heart, oh million,
Say to those in the house of tin,
“Wake up!
Your lost friend returns.
Your friend who wandered too far, forgive him.
Oh you who live in a house of tin,
Come out, rejoice!
I am not Christ,
But I’ll tell you something,
And I swear it to you,
I swear to you-
The world is lie upon lie
And you alone are true.”

                             *

Sucked through the ribs
The heat of noon unbuttons my breast,
My breast, still full of sighs,
Sighs and clanging iron and songs.
Oh come Baramhat- Spring, perfume,
Greenness, sparrows, silkworm.
Come here and see me without a mask.
For after Amshir, the father of wind,
And Tuba, the father of frost,
You come Baramhat, you gem,
You father of sun,
And my heart
Doesn’t know how to whisper.

The Falcon

Amal Donqal
Go round, winged falcon, go round
The year passes and the end will come
And when my death comes
It comes around, like the ravenous falcon.

The Pyramid Texts

2500 B.C.

The sword of Orion opens the doors of the sky.
Before the doors close the gate to the path 
through the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark,
As the falcon flies as the falcon flies
May Unis rise into the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark.
They make a path for Unis.
Unis takes the path.
Unis becomes the falcon.

 

1200 B.C. (?)

The Song of the Harper

Death is before me today
Like the smell of myrrh
Like sitting under sails in the wind
Death is before me today
Like the smell of lilies 
Like sitting on the shore of a drunken land
Death is before me today

Invocation to a Scribe

If you learn this profession 
You will become a writer
Think of the writers of the past
Their names have become immortal
Even though they are dead
And their descendants are gone.
They didn’t make themselves tombs out of copper
With tombstones of iron from heaven
They didn’t think about leaving heirs
In order to perpetuate their names.
They made heirs out of books
They had written themselves.
People they will never know are their children
For a writer is a teacher to all.
Their houses are buried, 
their servants are gone,
Their graves are forgotten, 
But their names live on 
In the books they made
While they were alive.
Be a writer. Take this to heart.
And your name will be like theirs.
Writing is better than something made of stone
Than a solid tomb
For it lives in the heart.
A man decays,
His corpse is dust
His family dies,
But his books live on.

End [by Susan Brind Morrow]

I like having a fierce dog

Who barks and bites

And leaps at your head

The beauty boy who sleeps at my thigh

Red fox red

My beautiful Ted. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What carnivore 

brought down the deer

Whose rib-cage stands red

In the brown spring fields below

 

Venus rising in the dawn

Frost on the lawn

This April morning.

                                                                 *

We sat and watched the sun go down across the lake below through the broken black outlines of the trees. The faint flicker of a rainbow formed for an instant in the low sky to the north as though it were the rim of something suddenly visible, the shining fragment of the rim of a halo. The last light fell in a wave of gold that swept quickly around the room settling for a moment on each of us in turn. We sat talking in the dark, in what seemed like a box of deep blue light as we had in summers past, so that the evening had about it a sense of timelessness.

I reminded Terry of how once he said that everything operates on the level of four basic elements, their combining and breaking down, and that we are all “just some spectacular sideshow,” as though all the desperate suffering of life were simply an elaboration of this basic principle.

“What is it that makes a human being?” He had said, “What defines being human? Falling in love. And what is that? Seeing something ordinary- as numinous. Seeing. The intensity of that focus, that concentration of energy, would be the heating up in which some significant transformation could take place.”

The Eastern Forest [Susan Brind Morrow]

 

The horns of a deer are still soft in September
An owls face is mostly ear

 

Fire in the trees at the end of winter
When red tongues of color run under their skin

 

The season of death begins with strokes of red
Its cold breath pours over the hill that swallowed the sun

 

Beeswax and fruit
And honey that tastes like raspberries thick with crystal in the comb
The full to bursting days of leaves on East Lake Road
A map of color in the fall between the fields and lake,
Sharp prickling smell of winter-
Pale blues, crushed powder snow,
The early green of winter wheat
In upturned earth; and summer’s riches
Seaweed and fish slime and stones baked on the shore,
And wreathes of rainbowed gasoline that flow
Under the dock where the carp spawn at night
In the shallow water-
The good things about Geneva
Almost make me forget its gloom,
And how my heart was broken there-
Torn into a blossoming wound,
The rose grows out of the wound

                                *

Unsheathed deer gut by the stream
A black living rust licks it down to the soft stones
Soaked in green light.
A leopard frog froze in the water last night

 

Dozens of snails in rose translucent shells
And yellow
Plastered like closing flowers on the dead stems of reeds

Now in cinders
Cedar has leaves 
Like the skin of a salamander

 

Her hair was like the fur of a winter animal
And her hands were webbed like stars

 

Scraps of color in the forest
the head of the red-bellied woodpecker
satin against the dead wood

 

She made a pillow out of the dress
Dragonflies settled around it with a light papery scratch
Throbbing salamander bodies- and glossy prismed eyes
Funny how insects prefer certain colors

 

And beyond them the mirrory river
Full of forming stars

 

Soft as a newborn, milk fed fawn
Left in the woods by its horned mother and afraid

 

Black vultures shadowing each other around the white rock

 

Pale blue bone white days of winter
When the sun is warm and the wind is bitter

 

David found a luna moth- or had my mother found it for him
Pressed against the screen door of the kitchen, a left-over from the night.
It’s huge delicate wings were the most deliciously cool shade of green I had ever seen,
Such a fine unusual shade of green I could taste it in my mouth,
Feel it’s delicate tissue on the tips of my fingers.
How could I draw such a rare color into myself?
I could only do this, taste and feel the color, as I looked at the moth

 

Clouds closed the sky like a fist

 

The silver light has retreated onto the branch tips, silvering now only the shells of the trees.
It is November. The air is cold, and there is still a burning color to things
The red squirrels are whistling in the maples by the road.

 

On the dry stoney side of the creekbed in spring were efts the color of cinnabar flecked with gold, their eyed skin as soft as wet sand. The solitary stalk of a cardinal flower, its rare deep red the true scarlet of nature, would stand in the fresh green light of the wet wood like a hidden flag.

 

Would oh would I were a kingfisher
That flies among the halcyons
Along the breaking waves, 
With a fearless heart, that holy bird
The deep blue of the sea

Kingfisher detail, Nelson Shanks

-- Alcman; Susan Brind Morrow trans.

Light in the desert articulates things very strongly . . . [by Susan Brind Morrow]

Light

There is a clarity of light in the desert that articulates things very strongly. It changes from moment to moment, and with it the colors change, the colors and tones of the shadows and the rocks- from violet to blue to gray. One might say that this light enables one to see in a way that is not possible elsewhere. The light itself has a kind of purity, and for some this is why the desert is a holy place. The desert eats everything, desert nomads say. And one might say, if this is death, this stark beauty, I’ll take it. For the desert is not a static thing, a place, but a process that is ongoing across the face of the earth. The Western Desert was once an ocean floor, peopled with fish and crinoids and oyster shells, whose remains are thickly embedded in the vividly colored layers of sea clay sculpted into isolated outcrops by the desert wind. Once it was a forested plain, and the shells of trees, turned to red and brown shards of stone, lie heaped in places among the fragments of bone scattered over the ground like a fine covering of soft white snow. If everything- oceans and forests and all living things, ultimately become this pure land of rock and light, one might think, if this is death I’ll take it, I am willing to be part of the inevitable transformation of all things into this stark absolute beauty. 

The Translation of Nature                                                          

Tongues in trees

Books in the running brooks

Sermons in stones

And good in everything

The great sea that surrounds us all is not death but life. We cannot see the radiant flow of animate minutiae that pervade the water, earth, and air around us. What we can see are the detailed symmetries of individual living things, and in these symmetries the underlying pattern that is the key to the mystery of eternal life. This hidden structure of life manifests in the Fibonacci lattices of growth that underlie the forms of plants and animals, and the dendritic mechanism of memory itself. The mind is a mirror, illuminating minute particularities even as it reflects in its very nature the universal flow.

The flow of radiolarians in the sea, shells and fragments left by drifting waves on the shore, masses of people drifting through airport corridors, rushing in waves toward departing planes. To capture these things is indeed to capture both beauty and insight as a bird in flight, to bring a sense of joy and motion to the intricate plethora of forms in nature, and to pass this vision on as a radiant gift to the world. 

Plants and animals are spun on the same pattern.

To see the human form as a fibrous mass of roots touches on this profound truth: A lace-like pattern of nerves underlies the skin of both, raising the question- when did these parallel life forms diverge?

The seed is what is left of the plant,

But the same cannot be said of us: you cannot plant the bones of an animal

This human dilemma, how to bring back to life what remains, 

has been universally solved by the book. 

 

What is involved is a conjuring trick. The electricity of the mind runs along vivid lines of association through its thread-like channels of memory. Hieroglyphs are not cryptic, but synecdoche: the sketch of an animal suggests some aspect of its nature. This animal particular conjures in the mind not merely itself, but its suggestion of a quality observed in other things. The flamingo is the hieroglyph for red, and blood; the crocodile for rage, and lightning- terrifying hidden things that strike. Forever hidden in the sign is the potential. The letter is the seed of the word. The word is the seed of thought.

Thus the very bones of language have the power to bring back what is gone.

The eye is the hieroglyph not to see, but to create. The presence of the artist is implicit in this insight. Perception is the essence of creation. What eye first saw the world in translation? Who created the alphabet? The composite phrase itself supplies the answer: alpha, the head of a bull, and beta, house, a word that even today can simply mean a movable divided tent. These are the paraphernalia of herders in semi-arid lands, people to whom water is in motion: a wave. Is it a wave made by wind on the sea? or is it the wave-like line left on desert rock as the water left by passing rain evaporates? There is always something wistful in catching the fleeting thing and writing it down.

The fossil stands for the form. Language works in much the same way. That letters on a page are the remnant rags of things: fossils and bones whose fine symmetries yet contain the spark of life; that the page is on and of the earth itself, are truths that capture the magical essence of memory, of how it works, of what writing and representation are, and are for.

one can imagine standing on the shore of an ancient sea, picking up fragments of coral or stone and arranging these shapes with aesthetic delight on the beach- clearing the ground with the flat of a hand to make a smooth page out of dirt or sand, and letting aesthetic intuition create a thought, a storyline, with a fluid mix of suggestive objects. A fragment suggests a human hand (the hieroglyphic verb to give); another a face (the preposition upon), or the hoof of an animal (the sign to repeat, to do it again).

 Thus random objects become signs in the magical glow of the mind, in the endless flow of luminous living things, including ourselves. The skull, the simple remnant of a human form- no more complex than a seed pod that has lost its meaning once the seed is gone- comes to mean death itself. Not death but the fear of death, for death is an idea that belongs to the illusion of the solidity of the world. 

Shakespeare told the truth: 

nothing of him that doth fade, 

but doth suffer a sea change 

into something rich and strange.

 

Above are prose poems I wrote as essays on the work of portrait photographer E.C.Warner, and the artist Michele Oka Doner

The Eye

The Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison wrote in 1912, (to paraphrase from memory), “Always pay attention to the untranslatable word, for there you may rediscover the source of sanctity.”

To pursue a question about an untranslatable word:

What is the origin, hence original meaning, of the word Jehovah/Yahweh?  

I offer an answer to this age-old question from my own observations: it is the hieroglyphic word yahw, the life-giving light that shines through all things.

This principle, the relationship between light and life, is deified in Egypt. Images in relief can be giant hieroglyphs. In this relief of Akhenaten the yahw hieroglyph, the sun streaming light, gives life to plants and people on earth alike. The rays of light are hands holding out the sign of life to everything that lives. It is the image of Avalokteshvara, he who looks down, touching every living thing with a thousand life-giving hands, open hands with eyes on them that see all the suffering of the world, that the see the reality of the world. In the Pyramid Texts these two concepts occur together where the hieroglyph is doubled in the cryptic phrase the brilliant light is in the heart of his eye. The hieroglyphic eye is the verb to create, associating the Yahweh concept with creation, with yahweh, light, as the creator, the eye that sees and shines at once.There is much Astronomy in Egyptian religious poetry. Here the soul as an infant (the word for which in hieroglyphs is moses) is washed in the field of rushes, the eastern stars at dawn.

Pure is he who is washed in the field of rushes

Pure is the light in the field of rushes

Pure is he who is washed in the field of rushes

Pure is Unis in the field of rushes

You are born of dusk with Orion

You rise with Orion in the Eastern Sky

And descend with Orion again in the West

The third with you is Sirius, purest of places,

Who leads along the fair paths of the sky

Through fields of celestial rushes

 

The soul rises as Orion.

The stars are fields.

The stars are blossoming

The stars are green

Sew green stones

The turquoise, malachite stars

And grow green, that Tety grow green

Green as a living reed

The stars are the souls of the dead, blossoming like plants in the sky.

"Everything falls apart, but poetry lasts . . ." [by Susan Brind Morrow]

1. Water

I realized in my teens that the only thing I was really interested in was poetry, and everything I did had to do with that. My mother had a reverence for poetry and knew a great deal by heart, and we were trained to memorize at a young age and grew up with the Oxford Book of English Verse and American Verse as primary books in the house. Her Aunt was a Canadian poet who lived very simply in a wilderness retreat called Abbey Dawn with her husband, a Canadian gunner in the RAF who was shot down over Germany in WWI, and after a long time in a German prison camp just wanted the life of a woodsman in the Great Lakes. So for us from the beginning poetry was connected with nature, and with a kind of religious feeling too- a traditional perspective I think, and very American. It had to do with looking closely at things, with the translation of the visual world. There was an awareness, probably coming from WWI, that everything falls apart, but poetry lasts. Later as I looked at other languages I was keenly aware of words having a tactile quality, a closeness to the physical thing.

Like a lot of people of my generation, I imagine, as I look back I am very happy to have been alive when I was, when there were no cellphones and you could go anywhere and nobody knew you, and those who did didn’t know where you were. I spent a long time in Egypt, a spectacular environment not unlike the Finger Lakes where I come from, an environment dominated by water.

I am publishing a book of poetry and watercolors next year. The book is called Water, and begins with something I wrote on the beach at Exuma where we used to go in the wintertime, a poem in which I am just describing what I see. The book is a sort of American Zen album like the albums of China and Japan with images from nature and poems beside them. I published a book like this called Trees in the middle of my second book Wolves and Honey and include pages from both books below:

Water: Conch shell watercolor, Stocking Island

Trees: Cicada, Cicatrix (Webster's Dictionary), Thaw 

Applause Learning [by Dara Barrois/Dixon]

Hello, from western Massachusetts.  Just this past Thursday night we were entertained by notnostrums film WHEN YOU THINK OF IT.  (admission: two of notnostrums editors are related to me) The beauty and exuberance of this 50 minute film of poets reading where they choose to read:  one shoulder deep in water (yes, the poem she's reading involves water), another walking up a busy sidewalk, another on a swing, one while getting a tattoo, one while cooking eggs, another behind leaves, high up in a tree, another in a laundromat, others in other unlikely places, got me thinking more about poetry readings, in general.  I'd been wondering, outloud and often, why poets wind up

The poets and the poems in the film are definitely placed smack center in the middle of the world.  They make for us a very good case for believing attentive to poems even in the midst of distracting.  The disconnect/connect between and tattoo artist and the poet stuns one into a kind of disbelief that these two (& they work they're doing) are in direct physical contact.

 

from the archive; September 15, 2009

When Bad Lines Happen to Good Poems [by Laurence Goldstein]

(Ed note: David Lehman's Bad Line Contest post of September 2 reminded me of this earlier post by Laurence Goldstein. Follow this link to read the many comments on the post when it ran in 2009, then add your own take. sdl)

If you were empowered by the gods to travel back into the canon of poetry in English and change or delete one line, which would it be?  On occasions, sometimes years apart, I’ve put this query to literary acquaintances, and the winner of this unscientific survey is. . . Percy Shelley’s plaintive cry, “I fall upon the thorns of life.  I bleed.”  The reason often given, and it’s clear by the swiftness with which this line is proffered that many of my contacts have not heard the question for the first time, is that this line is a blemish on a great poem that has no other bad line, not even a so-so line, but is poetry at its purest and most consummate perfection.  The poem, of course, is “Ode to the West Wind.”  Actually, I have come to like “I fall upon the thorns of life,” which is thoroughly in tone with the fine succeeding lines, “A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed / One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.”  One has to hear and feel the desperate abandon of the whole passage to appreciate the upsweep of canto 5 when the poet becomes a seer of divine power who, “by the incantation of this verse,” trumpets a prophecy to mankind.

    But “I bleed” is, admittedly, beyond the pale, over the top.  Within the decorum of the poem it reaches too far and the strain of the gasped two words causes an audible snap.  How might we improve the line.  Substitute “, and need” or “, a seed”?  Those are bland enough to not claw at the reader’s taste.  I recall the story of Paul Valéry pausing at a bookstore window and reading two pages of verse from an open book. France’s reigning poetic genius, he tries to improve even one word of the text before him, and fails.  He goes into the bookstore and finds that the book is Racine’s Phèdre.  No, I am not Paul Valéry, and will not presume to tamper with Shelley any longer.

    Another favorite response is (you saw this coming) the last line of the first stanza of Stanley Kunitz’s great poem “Father and Son.”  The speaker pursues the phantom figure of his dead father, who never shared the boy’s childhood (and who, we know, took his life while Stanley was in the womb).  The boy is lost in “the silence unrolling before me as I came, / The night nailed like an orange to my brow.”  The principle is the same as with Shelley:  the high quality of the entire poem casts a brighter light on the offending lapse.  As it happens, a younger and brasher version of myself asked Kunitz about this line on the occasion of his visit to the University of Michigan .  He smiled wanly and gave what I took to be his standard response.  Many people had asked him about the line over the years, but now the poem is so well-known, so often anthologized, even (I reminded him) praised as a precursor to the movement of Confessional Poetry, that it was now too late to change it.  He looked down and said again in a whisper, “Too late.”  Never too late I wanted to reply, but I felt intensely his desire to change the subject.

    There is the problem of failed locutions – Matthew Arnold’s “Who prop, thou ask’st, in these bad

Dante, Near and Far [by Robert P. Baird]

There is much strange in La Vita Nuova, the libello or “little book” that Dante composed fifteen or so years before starting in on the Divine Comedy. Take, for starters, the form of the book, an alternation of prose and poetry that produces effects as dizzying as any in Williams's Spring and All. Or take the central narrative, which describes a love—young Dante’s, for the slightly younger Beatrice—so intense that it causes the poet to faint in public and forces him, poor lad, to write lying love poems to the donne dello schermo, the “screen ladies” he uses to hide the real object of his affection. Take even Beatrice herself, who begins the book as a girl in a girdled dress only to reveal herself not long after as a miracle made flesh.

All of this is strange for us to read, or should be, even if, grinning behind our commentaries, we spot in the donna dello schermo an unacknowledged ancestor of the celebrity beard. After all, when Dante says that Beatrice is a miracle, he isn’t indulging mere hyperbole, the way Roxette did in that song I remember too well from seventh grade. Nor does he mean it less merely in the manner of an established trope, as John Donne did at the end of “The Relic.” Uniquely for the time and all but blasphemously, Dante meant that his beloved’s appearance on earth was a miracle that repeated (and maybe even competed with) Christ’s Incarnation itself. In the young poet’s eyes, Beatrice was the agent of his religious salvation and the summit of all Creation, the radiant filament that binds together heaven and earth. 

Dante’s strangeness, his distance from us in time and cultural space, is the reason Eugenio Montale took T.S. Eliot gently to task for suggesting that the Commedia was “extremely easy to read…for a foreigner who does not know Italian very well.” It’s not that Montale felt any need to defend the reluctant intricacies of his native tongue. His point was to insist that “Dante is not a modern poet…and that the instruments of modern culture are not ideally suited to understanding him.”

And yet even if we accept Montale’s reminder as well warranted, and I do, I don’t think it’s careless or unfair to say that there are times when Dante can feel close to us, “strangely close,” as Montale admitted. Graduate school is far enough behind me that I won’t bother you with theories of transhistorical subjective affiliation. My effort here is only to point out, a little like a finger before the moon, a single small moment that I love in the Vita Nuova.

The moment I mean happens early in the libello. At the start of the third chapter, Dante is describing his second encounter with Beatrice. (The first occurred nine years earlier.) The meeting is brief and profound: eighteen-year-old Dante sees Beatrice in the street, she waves hello, and her greeting causes the young poet so much giddy distress that he decides he can only go home and put himself to bed. 

That night Dante has a dream, and—perhaps predictably, dreams being dreams—this is where things get weird. In his sleep the poet sees uno segnore di pauroso aspetto emerge from a fiery cloud. Despite his fearful aspect the lord is happy, very possibly because he is carrying in his arms a naked woman asleep beneath a crimson drape. After Dante realizes that the woman is Beatrice, the lord holds up a burning object and tells the dreaming poet, in Latin, Behold your heart. At that moment the lord wakes Beatrice and starts to force-feed her Dante’s flaming heart. With understandable reluctance, Beatrice eats the thing until the lord’s happiness mysteriously turns to grief and he carries her away, presumably to heaven. 

As I said: weird. 

It was weird for Dante, too. So weird, he tells us, that he woke immediately afterward and decided to write a sonnet about what he saw. Not only did he write a sonnet but he told his readers, in the poem's second and third lines, that “these words I have composed are sent for your elucidation in reply.” And not only did Dante include this request (which I like to think of as the thirteenth-century equivalent of a self-addressed stamped envelope) he also decided to send the sonnet to molti li quali erano famosi trovatori in quello tempo, “many of the famous poets of that time.”

And here, finally, we get to the moment I love, the slender moon my finger’s been wagging after all this time. Here we see Dante—newly a poet, desperately in love—appealing to the judgment of his literary betters. Ostensibly, of course, the point was to ask about the dream, but who could doubt that what Dante really wanted was a judgment on his poem? What writer, what person of any ambition whatsoever, can’t remember that feeling of wanting to know—wanting to test—the quality of her nascent talent? 

It’s in this way that Dante comes to occupy, in my mind, anyway, the head of a secret history of such events, the benedictions or baptisms that link one poetic generation to the next. This is the history in which a young Walter Whitman sends Ralph Waldo Emerson an unsigned and unattributed copy of Leaves of Grass. This is Emily Dickinson asking T. W. Higginson, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” This is Paul Muldoon sending Seamus Heaney a sheaf of poems topped with the question “What's wrong with these?” (“Nothing,” the older poet responded, or so the story goes.) 

Among those who responded to Dante, the Vita Nuova acknowledges only Guido Cavalcanti, whose response “Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore” marked the start of the poets’ friendship. On the reading of his future primo amico, Dante’s dream was a vision of “all value, every joy and goodness that one can feel.” Cavalcanti suggests that the lord “who rules the world of honor” wanted to bring Beatrice back from near-death with the flaming food of Dante’s love.

It’s no surprise that Dante would choose this response to quote in his Vita Nuova, even while he would insist, as well, that “the true meaning of the dream I described was not perceived by anyone then.” As scholars have argued, Cavalcanti’s interpretation of the dream, while not strictly coincident with Dante’s own, was nevertheless close enough to buttress the latter’s dramatic sense of his love’s significance. 

Not all of Dante’s respondents, however, were so encouraging. Of the three reply-sonnets that survive, one, by the Tuscan poet Dante da Maiano, is about as far from Cavalcanti in spirit and tone as we can imagine. In so many words da Maiano tells Dante that it’s simple love-sickness that’s got him bothered, and probably bad hygiene besides. If Dante really wants to heal himself he needs to get rid of the noxious vapors infecting his brain. And the only way to do that, da Maiano says, smirking down the centuries, is for the young poet to go and give his testicles a good washing.

Here, too, we get the chance to meet Dante at his most queasily familiar: not as a prodigy reveling in the warm validation of his peers, but as a callow poetaster hearing harsh words from a poet he respects. It’s probably too easy to admire da Maiano’s sonnet for its precocious snark, but I appreciate his poem even more for the rare gift it affords: the chance for once to meet Dante outside the glare of his own genius.

Poet Spotlight: Cole Swensen [by Kristina Marie Darling]

It's truly an honor to introduce this new work by acclaimed poet Cole Swensen.  Here, she offers a complex and gorgeously lyrical phenomenology of perception, deftly interrogating the ways that language shapes one's experience of the senses and the world around us.  In Swensen's newest work, the unique artistic opportunities of poetry - performative language, metaphor, and the image - are brought to bear on these philosophical questions with incredible skill.  It is the associative logic that Swensen implements that allows her to present inquiries into the nature of language and perception in a visceral way. Indeed, "New Green" involves and implicates the reader in the speaker's efforts to understand - and delineate - a clearer boundary between self and world.  This is a stunning addition to an already accomplished body of work.  

Cole Swensen is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017), Gave (Omnidawn, 2017), and Landscapes on a Train(Nightboat 2015), and a volume of critical essays. Her poetic collections turn around specific research projects, including ones on public parks, visual art, illuminated manuscripts, and ghosts. Her work has won the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and the founding editor of La Presse Poetry (www.lapressepoetry.com). She teaches at Brown University.

New Green by Cole Swensen 

What is the unseen, and how do we see it before it emerges? That is the nature of earliest things, and you try to observe what comes first—a blade of grass, a livening of the moss, an outbreak of leaf—looking out the window and then walking outside in search of emergence. It really does have a different color—which is also what’s puzzling your child as she runs out of the house holding up a crayon, asking “What does New Green mean? Haven’t all colors been around forever?” And I think of the translation that I’ve just finished for a catalogue in which the artist, among a list of colors, included verd, which turned out to be old French for vert, and, sure enough, Old English has grene, but despite this clear illustration, the child refuses to believe that it’s possible to invent a new color simply by inventing a new word.

"Letters to Dead Editors" [by Tom Disch]

On July 1, 2008, at 11:16AM, Tom Disch revealed God's "other" Big Idea of the day. He called it "Letters to Dead Editors."

<<<
Another were-there-but-world-enough theme anthology. It was to have been a whole collection by yours truly, and the first letter would have been sent to Mrs. Gaskell, who inmho should be included with the great Victorian novelists, along with the woman she wrote the biography of, Charlotte Bronte. Recently the BBC has given Mrs. G. some of the attention she merits. So much so that she doesn't really need me beating the drum for her, tho my letter would have been written in response to her great novel about the urban underclass, Mary Barton. What she brought to bear was a humorless (but perceptive) Moral Earnestness and a patient trompe l'oeil realism about the daily life of the miserable-most poor. By comparison Dickens comes across as lazy and/or sneeringly cruel.

I've tried writing such letters to real-life good writers but they are too busy trying to grab the brass ring or otherwise advance up the ladder, or else simply think me pushy or wicked or dumb and don't write back or just say thank you, goodbye. Maybe it would be different now in the era of blogs and email, but back then my epistolary charms had no effect on the likes of Louise Erdrich et al. As indeed, they shouldn't have. There are too many possible venal reasons why we don't write to our favorite celebrities. But to those safely dead and in their vaults--why not? The idea would be to address them as though they were real people, not statues swathed in marble togas and bronze crinolines, and as though they'd been keeping up with the things they had usually been interested in.

If anyone wants to give it a try, you could post a specimen letter here, but this should not be the usual Anything Goes comment. Mere japery on the order of "Shit happens" as one's whole letter to Dale Carnegie would rate a quick dele from God's red pencil. But I do think, and so does God, that it might be a nice book. Indeed, He often writes such letters Himself and sends them poste restante to the big post office on high.

-- Tom Disch  >>>

from the archive; first posted November 1, 2008

"Thursday" [by Mark Ford]

When I began writing poetry many moons ago, for some reason I deemed allusions infra dig, unbecoming. I suppose like all young poets I wanted my stuff to be anti-academic, to be a breath of fresh air – and I was mindful of Kenneth Koch’s poem on the subject, ‘Fresh Air’, in which he imagines a strangler dealing mercilessly with any poet he surprises alluding to Orpheus, Cuchulain, Gawain or Odysseus. Accordingly, my first collection, Landlocked, is largely allusion-free, though there’s a stray reference in one poem to Charlotte Brontë, and another borrows its title from a song by Olivia Newton-John. No casual dipping of my young and fevered hand into what Philip Larkin once derisively called ‘the myth-kitty’.

Then I began to brood – particularly on the oeuvres of 20th century poetry’s giants, on the careers of Eliot and Pound and Lowell and Olson and co., and on the vast quantities of criticism their work had inspired. Much of this criticism focused on their deft use of precisely the resource I had forsworn; throwing in a bit of Dante, quoting a line of Pope, furnished just the sort of grist the critical mill craved, and without appreciative criticism, what hope of immortality? None

I decided, therefore, that to be taken seriously I needed allusions, and plenty of ‘em; what’s more I decided to remedy matters in one fell swoop by writing a poem that would consist almost entirely of allusions. But I also wanted this poem to do more than just make up my allusion-deficit. It had often occurred to me that no one had ever written a poem addressing a faux pas we all occasionally make, particularly when attempting to appear more knowledgeable than we really are. I’m talking about mixing up famous people who happen to have the same surnames, like Rod and Jon Stewart, or Marianne and Michael Moore… Surely such mix-ups, often harmless, occasionally amusing, deserved a poem of their own. Enough, you might think, and yet I wanted more, still more from this poem. For again brooding on what went into the kind of verse that achieved celebrity and critical acclaim for its author, it struck me that mention of foreign locations always went down well. References to Locarno or Kyoto or Aix-en-Provence make one look cosmopolitan, Byronic, au fait with the treasures and history of civilization. Though I’d done my fair share of travelling, indeed grew up many different countries, I’d so far made pitiful use of the places I’d visited. And even if I hadn’t visited them, who would know?... And what about, come to that, all those films I’d seen, often ones in foreign languages?... Anyway, here is the result of these weighty cogitations, and only the most sober and industrious of critics, one who is early to bed and early to rise, is likely to do justice to it:

            Early to Bed, Early to Rise

It was in Berlin you mixed up John and J.J. Cale,
And we found ourselves watching Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past
           yet again.

I, on the other hand, confused Teniers the elder and Teniers the
            younger
In Amsterdam, where I saw Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys on my own.

On the outskirts of Moscow we failed to distinguish clearly between
            Charles and Burl Ives:
Our punishment was to sit though Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible,
            Parts I and II, twice.

I met a man in New York who couldn’t tell the difference between
            George
And Zbigniew Herbert; his favourite film was Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu
            Monogatari, which he insisted we see together.

In Cardiff I confounded Edward, Dylan, and R.S. Thomas;
To get over my embarrassment I went to a performance of Jean-Luc
           Godard’s Alphaville.

People continually mistake the work of Antoine Le Nain for that of his
            brother Louis, even in Los Angeles,
Where most films are made, including Doug Liman’s Swingers, which I
            recently saw for the first time, and really enjoyed.

(Mark Ford)

from the archive; first posted Thursday, June 16, 2008

Tuesday: A Day in the Life [by Mark Ford]

5.37. Awakened by squalling of youngest, aged three, who’s convinced it’s morning. Six hours sleep is plenty, isn’t it?

8.51-9.26. Battling through London traffic on my sturdy hybrid, without incident other than the usual jarring from pot-holes. Last week I was menaced by a geezer who looked like an aging associate of the Kray Twins. ‘Did you spear me?’ he demanded, advancing threateningly from his silver hatchback. ‘You speared me!’ ‘I don’t even know what “spearing” is,’ I expostulated. After a long hard stare he allowed me by, but hurled at my fleeing back a pleasingly Pinteresque epithet: ‘You watch it, you two-bob c***!’

9.30-11.00 Marking and administration – chiefly beginning to set up a conference on the work of Stephen Spender for the end of February (it’s the centenary of his birth next year). Open package of books on Milton to be reviewed – another centenary – it’s 400 years since his birth . One is a lovely edition of Paradise Lost with reproductions of 12 engravings from the first illustrated edition of 1688. ‘While I abroad / Through all the coasts of dark destruction seek / Deliverance for us all.’

11.00-12.00 Lecture on Tennyson: Mariana’s sheds still broken, still sad and strange. Her life still dreary, she still wishes she were dead. Lecturers get older, but the poems lecturers lecture on don’t. Nor does the audience – I briefly refer to Margaret Thatcher, for reasons I can no longer recall, forgetting that most of my audience had only just been born when she fell.

1.00-3.00 Tutorials – Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Antony and Cleopatra. ‘Thou yet beholdst me, Eros?’ I borrowed this line, without the ‘Eros’, in a poem called ‘Hooked’, collected in Soft Sift. When I did so, for some reason it seemed like a breakthrough. It doesn’t now.

4.00-6.00 Staff meeting: impassioned discussion of this and that.

8.22. Children in bed. ‘Dusk has fallen / like a stone / quipped the prince / of the quotidian.’

(Mark Ford)

"Brilliant & bright": A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright [by Kristina Marie Darling]

"It has been an honor and a privilege to join in this weeklong celebration of Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry.  Today, I hope you will enjoy this feature of poetry and scholarship by TQ contributor Nick Courtright.  As a editor that prides herself on a commitment to rigorous critical discourse and innovative writing, I'm thrilled to offer this conversation across the boundaries of genre and discipline."--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. 

Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light, and Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist.  He is the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, he lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel. 

A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright 

Kristina Marie Darling:  In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also a gifted literary critic, with recent essays published or forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and more.  What has your practice as a literary critic opened up within your poetry? 

Nick Courtright:  I think it’s freed me to be more merciful in terms of what my poetry can mean. My critical approach revolves around the embrace of the most expansive interpretive range possible, one that takes into account the words, the history, the context, the whole bubbling heap of bad or wrong interpretations inflected by one’s own personal biases, etc. Because I take that tack in my critical appraisal of the meanings of others’ poems, I have to be generous in terms of what my own poems can mean. So although at this stage of my poetry career I’ve moved away from vagueness and abstraction, and try to paint very clear images, arguments, and narratives into my poetry, I really love for the overall takeaway of a poem to be ambiguous. I want the poems to be non-committal about whether their speaker is a hero or a villain, for example.

KMD:  In the spirit of the excerpt featured here, entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” I’d love to hear more about your literary and artistic influences.  What poets shaped your approach to craft and thematics? 

NC:  My earlier influences were of the Bidart, Blake, Bly, Lorca angle, with a love for odd images and confounding syntax and a pursuit of the ineffable. And in my latest poetry collection The Forgotten World I was thinking a lot about Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong and others who just write with aching beauty about difficult personal journeys. But lately I’ve found myself most drawn to narrative directness and the comic, so I’ve been reading more George Bilgere, Mary Biddinger, Anders Carson Wee, and Emilia Phillips, for example. Highly recommend all of those—brilliant and bright. And enjoyable! All of those poets surprise me constantly, and like all great writers, they mess with other writers, transforming other writers’ aesthetics and subject matter. It's impossible and pointless (and less fun) to resist.

KMD:  I’d love to chat about the extent to which poetry and criticism overlap and intersect.  To what extent do you see poetry as an act of reading and response, a deconstruction of work that’s come before your own?   

NC:  I think all poetry is shaped by its precursors, whether hundreds of years earlier or the new release dog-eared on the bedside table. “Nothing new under the sun,” etc. But despite the derivative nature of all works of art, there’s much play at the boundary in which one’s own consciousness—itself shaped by the explosions of stars and deoxyribonucleic acid and junk streaming on Netflix—can contribute something at least with the illusion of newness. Even if it’s all just the shuffling of a preordained deck of cards, we can be surprised when we end up for four aces one right after another, and the more open we are to the alchemy of one’s own artistic collision with history.

Alexey Tsvetkov: In Memoriam [by Andrey Gritsman]

“I am here together with myself and alone”

The great Russian poet Alexey Tsvetkov just passed away (February 1947- May 12, 2022).

He is a world-class poet, a world poet who happened to write in Russian.

Tsvetkov created his own poetic language, unrepeatable, addictive. Once started, a poem or a book could not be put down. One read to the end possessed by its magic. His incredible play, not of words, but of thoughts and images, bewitched the reader, as did his humor.

Alexey told us: whenever I write, I always write about death. The poet puts what’s created along with what is unsayable into metaphorical form. That is the power of poetry by Tsvetkov: he always writes about what is most important, what is deepest and darkest, presented metaphorically with an amazing mastery of words and meanings. His style of recital  I would characterize as toreutic, precise, cadential, and, on the other hand, paradoxically close to a natural speech, personal verbal communication.

Born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, formerly the Austro-Hungarian empire, Tsvetkov was educated in Odessa and Moscow. In Moscow together with other famous poets (Soprovsky, Gandlevsky, Kenzheev) he founded legendary underground poetry group Moscow Time. He emigrated to USA in 1975 after his arrest in Moscow and forced move to the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya. He was awarded PhD degree in Slavic Studies from University of Michigan. 

Tsvetkov spent many years in Europe working as a journalist for the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe (Munich and Prague, 1989-2004). He anchored the RFE/RL Russian Service programs The Seventh Continent and The Atlantic Diary.  He lived his last years in New York City among his poet friends. Supporting himself as a freelance journalist and essayist, he produced a large body of original, unique and very popular poetry. He read his poems at the Cornelia Street Café, Russian Samovar, Columbia University and other venues. In 2018 he moved to Israel, where he died.

Tsvetkov was an individual of very broad erudition, rough on the surface, very kind, with stunning sharp sense of humor. His poems in English are most unusual:  cadential, almost syllabo-tonic, very tight. But it looked very natural - the same poet, writing in a different language.

He was the author of ten books of poetry and translated Shakespeare’s Hamlet. His heritage will be studied and it will take a long time to look into layers of Tsvetkov’s art and thought.

Alexey Tsvetkov

the quiet ones

in a recurring dream i find myself
stuck in a tiny town a green and neat
affair the locals scarce and studiously silent
for the most part avoid me and stay indoors
although i dwell among them i assume
myself to be a thing apart the town
is strangely shorn of outskirts there's a river
flowing from north to south and the main street
cutting across with a bridge in the middle
yet both are terminated in oblivion

beset by this conundrum i've come up
with a hypothesis perhaps the locals
are candidates to be born on earth that never
made up their minds about the matter shaped
in human form already but afraid
to take the plunge hedging their bets and this
is what the actual limbo is like the river
forever runs on the road likewise but both
resolve themselves into the void the locals
would find it pointless to wake up their green
and tidy town remains the same no matter
whichever side of the retina it's on
the quiet ones within their silent walls
what do they want of us they share no subject
with us to serve them as a starting point
for striking up a palaver

it looks
like a half-way house perhaps a railway station
but with the waiting crowd resigned to the tracks
having been dismantled so that no train will ever
stop here they look alive but never having
been actually exiled to our vale of grief
there is no way for them to share our joy
the only thing they envy us in earnest
is death denied to the unborn it is
a mystery for them and a temptation
and i remaining stubbornly asleep
fall into a confusion like a rabbit
teasing a python on the eve of being
consumed by the above and peeking under
death's skirts then part of me awakens i
recall the other's name but hush it up

 

Andrey Gritsman

In Memory of Alexey Tsvetkov

What can be said about unsayable?
Poet departs with all his belongings.
To say nothing: it is unbearable.
On tree of life - invisible markings.

His airborne light verbs, evasive,
Escapable, straight and relentless.
Who knows what one is capable
Of, while alive and restless.

What is left now: only new language
Speaking in tongues, and no sound.
He rests in peace, his last message
Only by those can be found

Only by those, who departed
Crossing the line into darkness
Keeping belongings in heart and
Calling him: the answer is silence.

Editor Spotlight: Hasanthika Sirisena [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Hasanthika Sirisena work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life(Atria Books, 2018), and twice named a notable story by Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. She is currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Susquehanna University and she is acting editor at West Branch magazine. Her books include the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and the forthcoming essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University 2021). 

Kristina Marie Darling:  You are an accomplished cross-disciplinary practitioner, whose work exists in spite of and beyond the categories of writing and art.  How did you first become interested in creating cross-disciplinary work?   

Hasanthika Sirisena:  I started drawing when I was very young. I never thought of myself as very smart and I struggled with English and with writing. Drawing allowed me to have confidence and gave me a means of articulating myself. I went on to study fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago and, in fact, have a BFA so I have a long and deep training in visual media. I really only started writing in my early thirties and for a little while I stopped drawing. Cross-disciplinary and hybrid work has allowed me to merge these two identities. 

KMD:  Tell me some of the ways that cross-disciplinary work is or can be politically charged.   

HS:  Cross-disciplinary work often asks us to think about and rethink our assumptions of form. For example, I’m currently reading Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson’s The Trojan Woman, A Comic.  I was delighted when the book arrived and was the size and heft of a children’s book. The translation itself rethinks what it means to actually make a translation. The opening references James Baldwin and Joan Didion (and probably a few other writers I missed.) I can’t read Greek but I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by assuming that the original play doesn’t allude to Baldwin much less quote Didion. The playfulness here—with the boundaries and capaciousness of language and intent—force me to confront how we decide who gets to make art and the audiences they make art for. 

But it’s the images themselves that are extraordinary. The images stand in for the actor and ask us to meditate on what an illustration—either drawn or acted—actually is.  How does an illustration contain force and agency? All this for a work that is also a profoundly antiwar message.  

Honestly, just asking us to stop and think and deliberate is a political act.  

KMD:  I’d love to hear about one piece from TQ that you selected or curated that stayed with you.  What made it memorable?   

HS:  Well, I wasn’t the one who selected Sarah Minor’s “A Poetry Comic” in Issue 25 but I’m deeply in love with it. Everything is so expertly rendered, from the quality, and energy, of the line drawings to the beauty of the language. I feel I could stare forever into the flames of “Photos from a fight appear to capture two people in love” panel. 

Laci Mosier is a former student of mine and I want to plug her collages (also in Issue 25). She is dedicated to the physical process of cutting, slicing, tearing—as opposed to computer generated collages—and I loved the physicality, humor, and deep intelligence of her work. (Quick note: I also do a lot of digital drawing and painting so I’m not at all against that.)  

KMD:  What advice do you have for poets who are interested in creating hybrid or cross-disciplinary work, who excel at writing but perhaps don’t have the technical facility with film, collage, or visual mediums?   

"Crimson is the Color of Shame": a Poetry Challenge [by Clark Thomas]

Crimson is the Color of Shame
-- for David Lehman

The demand on young Jews
to be less visibly and confidently Jews
is the price of social toleration
which found its most recent iteration
in the Harvard Crimson
editorial endorsing the Philistines vs Samson,
that is, the boycott movement against Israel
which is a big and ugly deal
according to Einat Wilf, in a sound-
ly argued essay. She calls it (BDS) the “pound
of flesh,” echoing The Merchant of Venice,
reminding us of a perpetual menace,
the attempt to intimidate the Jews
into being less Jewy, a typical political ruse.

-- Clark Thomas

"I wrote this poem at David Lehman's invitation in an attempt to refute his statement that 'political poems are usually successful neither as poems nor as political maneuvers.'"  -- C.T.

David Lehman replies: "Clark Thomas wrote to me that he would take up the 'poetry challenge' implicit in my arguing that political poetry is a doomed and often self-defeating proposition. While I applaud his use of rhyme, and the way he condenses an intelligent and ambitious essay into the box of a sonnet, I am far from confident that the result is more than a superior letter to the editor.  What do readers think?"

"Where's that map of the Middle East?" -- God

from Einat Wilf, "The BDS Pound of Flesh" in Tablet
<<<
When I attended college in the United States in the mid-1990s, liberal, left-wing Jews could comfortably be pro-Israel and even active in AIPAC without any fear of repercussions or social pressure to hand over a pound of flesh. That changed with the emergence of J Street, IfNotNow, and Jewish Voice for Peace, until we arrived at the present condition, in which a Jewish student who does not show herself to be an ally of Students for Justice in Palestine, or does not agree that “Zionism equals racism,” or that Zionism is a form of apartheid, and Nazism, and white supremacy, and whatever other supreme evil will be identified next, cannot be considered a good Jew. This escalation in anti-Israel activism among some young Jews no longer seemed like a natural and excusable choice shaped by different generational circumstances, but the result of a relentless campaign of bullying.

Over the last several months, as a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I taught a course called “Zionism and Anti-Zionism.” In the many hours I spent discussing student life with students and faculty alike, it became apparent that the anti-Zionist activism on campus—the college version of the pound of flesh dynamic—was not primarily a form of social protest or political expression, but a form of bullying. The anti-Zionist activists, like classic bullies, deliberately targeted the real and perceived frailties of their Jewish peers—fear or shame in the expression of one’s Jewish identity, with its calls to Jewish solidarity and deep connection to a faraway foreign country.

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been one of the most effective expressions of the pound of flesh bullying tactic, inviting young Jews to participate in the cause of “social justice” only to ultimately demand the mutilation of their Jewish identity. BDS has demanded that diaspora Jews not only criticize Israeli government actions, but sever their connections with Israel completely. >>> -- Einat Wilf, "The BDS Pound of Flesh" in Tablet, May 10, 2022

See also https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/is-anti-zionism-anti-semitism in which Isaac tries to out-argue the head of the antri-defamation league on the subject. The best line is  "Give me a -- Isaac" -- where the speaker's frustration is conveyed beautifully. The reader supplies the missing word, "break."

On No Tokens, with Hannah Beresford [by Lauren Hilger]

A Conversation with Poetry Co-Editor Hannah Beresford

 

Lauren Hilger: What is your earliest memory of working with NT poems? 

 

Hannah Beresford: My first submission period with NT, I printed all of the submissions. It was so extra. T Kira literally said, “This is so extra.” What experience I had of an editorial nature was in workshops, and I’d only been in workshops where we distributed hard copies and marked them up by hand. I didn’t know how to get in that mode, to really sink into a poem, through a computer screen. I still feel that way, but am learning restraint. 

 

I am often surprised by how much being an editor–getting behind the scenes of submittable–does not buffer me from the anxiety of submitting, even despite my better judgment. There is so much work we love and have to pass on. Every journal says that, but it really is true! And yet, when those rejects come in my inbox, I lose that context–I feel small again. Does being an editor help you field the trials of being a poet? And if so, help, tell me how!

 

LH: Hah! I have a perverse love for the admin of submitting. I try to maintain the same amount of submissions out at any time. I'm always shocked to receive a personal note or nice rejection, though. It's the moment that breaks (with a human chord) the robotic process I want it to be.

LH: How do you feel about the old adage that one has to read the lit mag before submitting?

 

HB: Sure! In a yes or no sense. Is it a venue for my work, or maybe not so much? If you’re unsure, what have you to lose (unless they charge submission fees)? But, I wouldn’t advise writing toward an aesthetic with a particular venue in mind.

 

LH: I’m wondering, how do you recognize in your own reading that you are gravitating toward a poem? 

 

HB: This is usually a sensory response. My reading or mind’s eye is saturated by a color. That leaves the most lasting impression on me. Then, I experience the poem and its color in a tactile or corporeal way. The metronomic organs have a lot to do with how I experience creative work. Breath, heart rate. And secondarily, the reactive organs. A poem that stays in my mind hasn’t transcended for me. I had a student who would yell “goosies!” when she loved a poem in workshop. We talk about that a lot—whatever you call it. Goosebumps, most often. I don’t know what it is from a scientific standpoint, but when I feel that, I think it’s a response without an outlet. Maybe because it’s a response to something imaginary, or maybe because it’s a response that feels indeterminable, unresolvable. Empathy is unresolvable. Anxiety, fear, desire. Poetry is corporeal, at its genesis, poetry is an art form of and through the body. We experience it mostly on the page now. Maybe I like a poem that knows its roots are in bodies. For a moment it activates and occupies me from some ancient lineage. I’m a grounding rod, and then it’s gone again. Then, right there, is a particular weightlessness. Maybe the relief of feeling hyper-embodied registers like an instant disembodiment. The poem is super-humanizing, then exalting. Yeah, goosies!

 

LH: How soon do you know a piece is asking for you to take it seriously? 

 

HB: In short, it’s a matter of subversion. When a piece continually defies my expectation, I feel most provided for. I hardly ever want to know where I’m going. I want to surrender to the lead, but predictabilities will keep me engaging with the work in a mechanical way. I don’t think a reader can help that; when you see tracks, you follow them. When I feel sure that I can’t get where the piece is going any faster than it will take me there, I’ll resign to the line, or the word, or the page. I want to be humbled, to feel overthrown. 

[No Tokens Issue 9 Cover: Erika Diehl, 2018, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, shot with a Fuji x100]

 

HB: What is a first poem that moved you, and how has your reception changed over the years? 

 

LH:  Bruce Weigl’s "What Saves Us" felt like it had slipped some message under the door for me. As a Catholic kid reading this poem, I kind of fell asleep midway through and thought "yea yea yea okay I know where we're going with this." The end then knocked me out. It still does, in fact, I never remember the end when I bring this poem to mind. I remember the girl, her skirt, the religiosity, but I forget what made me love it: that spooky, unanswerable end!

 

Tell me, how does working as an editor across genre and collections aid in your curating of individual poems as units?

 

HB: I know it isn’t fashionable to prescribe to genre, and I get that. I’m on board. I don’t think there are genre specific limitations. But it would be untrue to say that there are not strengths specific to the differences between how I experience most poems and most prose. (Here, I am permitting an assumption that, more often than not, a prose work exceeds a poetical work in length or volume or time attended to it, per unit.) For example: I love a poem that knows where its ground is but levitates above it. I love that tension, I love that defiance. There is definition, a contour, in the refusal to anchor. To what extent is that kind of suspension above, or resistance to, a grounding plane sustainable in book-length prose? I won’t answer that question. I don’t know! Anything can be done. So, to your question, the more I read and edit and learn across genres, the more I look at a poem and think: here’s an opportunity! I can be pressed to spend more time in this, I can be asked more easily to re-read, I can have more questions in the end. I’m here for it—give me stratums, and coding, and metaphor, give me words to learn and research to be done. A treasure hunt, a Russian doll, the onion—all the clichés. Someone has committed, there’s time to be spent!

 

As an addendum here, it would be negligent to disregard sonics. To me, the sonic quality of a piece overlays or underpins any and every other decision the writer makes. It is a constant accompaniment. It informs everything, but it precludes nothing. Should prose by its nature, regardless of volume or length, be held to any lesser standard of intentionality of sonics than poetry is? Intentionality is key. Should all prose be harmonious, undulating, lyrical, sonorous, or hypotactic? Should all poetry? I want to feel assured that the sonics of a work were a choice; purposeful. Discordance can inform or reinforce meaning or character. Redundancy, imbalance—too. And sometimes, yes, musicality is affecting.

HB: You and I have talked a lot over the years about poetry’s reception in the popular-ish culture. This AWP we talked more specifically about poetry’s reception in the literary culture. If you could speak to any one misconception or have any one thing known about poetry–whether to the greater public, or even amongst writers–what would it be?

 

LH: Poetry threatens everything I think I know sometimes too! And that's okay! Something I say at the beginning of every new class I teach is "you don't have to apologize for not knowing anything about poetry, not being a poet, or hating poetry. You don't have to apologize for being a poet. There is no difference! We're all encountering it together!"

 

How have you sensed NT has evolved or changed? 

 

HB: Maybe it is not so much that we have changed, but our opportunities have broadened. In the beginning, I felt a strong sense of joining the collective of a brilliant masthead. Of course, that is still true—the honor of my life. But more and more, I see NT becoming something of its own as well. More folks have heard of NT and so our slush is more and more dynamic and, honestly, stacked. It’s hit after hit. Our reach as a journal exceeds our individual orbits more and more. There are so many talented people out there. I feel lucky that NT is on the radar of all of our submitters, and more of them every year.

 

What did you expect when you came on board with NT at its very inception? What did NT mean to you then, and what does it mean to you now?

 

LH: I met our founding EIC T Kira at MacDowell and first heard about the magazine over breakfast one morning. After I was offered the position, I remember hoping she'd trust me and that I could do a good job. Almost a decade in, I still want to just do as much as I can. Learning from and connecting with contributors means everything to me. 

 

What is your hope for NT's future?

 

HB: I love the young writers and poets prizes so much. I feel like that’s where my heart is. The young poets blew us away! I’d love to see NT grow more on a community level; programming and initiatives that extend beyond the literary world. An inclusive point of accessibility for reading and writing.

[No Tokens cakes along with Poetry Co-Editors Lauren Hilger & Hannah Beresford]