After reading Dr. Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” again and again over many years, and reading it again now, I don’t find it depressing at all. Quite the opposite. I find it invigorating. And that’s in large part due to its language, maybe especially to its vigorous, often surprising adjective-noun combinations.
John Poch’s new book of poems, “The Future of Love,” is so full of riches that I can’t possibly do them all justice in this post. So I’m going to focus on three of the book’s main motifs: Spain, colors, and love. Poch has clearly spent considerable time in Spain. It’s referred to or is even the setting for over fourteen of the book’s poems.
Along with Richard Wright, many other African American writers have spoken about the awakening they received from books. Ralph Ellison recalled that he “read voraciously,” that “the act of reading” was “an apprenticeship in freedom.” James Baldwin read “every single book I could get my hands on.… Books taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive.”
This book is primarily composed of love poems that I have been writing for over twenty years for my wife. They are all free verse poems, except for the title poem, made of lines of only three syllables each. Of all the poems I’ve written, probably half my work is in strict forms and half free verse. But this collection, for some reason, has pushed the regular meters/structures away in favor of wilder rhythms and lines. Lastly, this book is almost entirely set in Spain, where we spent a good amount of time in the first fifteen years of our marriage.
One early morning, after unloading the dishwasher, grinding beans for my wife’s coffee, and boiling water for my tea, I sunk into my usual spot—a love seat near our gas fireplace—, switched on the reading lamp, and opened Elizabeth Jacobson’s Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air. My head was filled with a fog like the thermal inversion fog I often see in the valley outside my window. I hoped one of Jacobson’s poems would, like the sun, warm the mental fog sufficiently for it to be lifted.
I was watching “Vampyros Lesbos” the other day, which is, shall we say, very much less than a perfect movie. It is not even, by any reasonable standard for what makes a movie good, a good movie. It is a bad movie, and upon further reflection I’m not even sure if we should call it a movie at all, since it is constructed so sloppily.
The binding of my 1988 paperback edition of Czeslaw Milosz’s The Collected Poems is drying out, so that some sections of pages are coming apart. But what haven’t dried out are my many yellow post-its throughout the book—notes on various poems that especially spoke to me two or three decades ago. Many of these poems address in some way Milosz’s relation to God—which is what interests me for this post.
There’s a five-stanza poem by Wallace Stevens that I return to often. I’ve never seen it reprinted in a selection of his poems or in an anthology, but its story intrigues and absorbs me, and I’m mesmerized by its sounds and images. It has been on my mind recently as I’ve been thinking about close reading, what it is and the terms we use to describe it.
Five years after reading her poem at President Biden’s Inauguration, Amanda Gorman offers us two new poems addressing public affairs—but now not in a hopeful time, but in a time of grief, fear, and outrage at I.C.E.’s brutality towards the members of the “homeland” it claims to secure—towards Renee Good, towards Alex Pretti, towards all of us.
Born in Gaza in 1963, Nasser Rabah lives there to this day. He has published five collections of poetry and two novels. With the help of his colleague and friend Saleh Razzouk, a Syrian translator and writer in Aleppo, Philip Terman has been translating some of Rabah’s poems. The poem “14,000,” about Gazan children, was originally posted on Rabah’s Facebook page as “4,000” on December 1, 2023.
Many people get introduced to the Jewish writer and Holocaust victim Anne Frank via her “Diary of a Young Girl” in a middle school literature class. But my own first impression of Anne came from her less well-known “Tales from the Secret Annex,” which deviates from the tone and material of her Diary in that it is a collection of mostly fictitious anecdotes and sketches.
I keep coming back to the color blue. Or maybe the color blue keeps coming back to me. Or I keep getting directed and redirected to the color blue. I spent a lot of time, over the last few years, with the paintings of Joan Mitchell. There wasn’t a tree out there she couldn’t paint blue. And before Mitchell, for me, was Franz Marc. He liked to paint animals blue, especially horses.
I’ve been making my way through books of photographs on the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. Nearly always, he’s dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie. It’s the consistency of this visual record that by contrast makes John Wilson’s portrait of King (1985) so mesmerizing. Wilson (1922–2015) was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and muralist known for powerful paintings, illustrations, and other works of art that honor Black dignity, racial justice, and equality.
I believe that the great poets and writers (and other artists) can be like shamans who show us deep truths about the society of which we are part. That’s why I wrote Legends of the Slow Explosion, which is about various figures who had stories to tell us that were embodied in their lives and times. The people are various—Miles Davis and Hannah Arendt, for instance—but they all fit that legendary profile.
Loose talk recently emitted by powerful people about the possibility of exploding nuclear weapons again made me recall Beat poet Gregory Corso’s marvelously playful shape-poem “Bomb.” In 1960, when it was included in Corso’s poetry collection The Happy Birthday of Death, because of the poem’s length, “Bomb” was inserted into the binding in a compressed fold-out accordion format. When expanded, the poem revealed the exploding bomb itself.
There’s no question that O.K./okay is an American coinage, going back to the mid-nineteenth century. I’ll touch below on the various theories of its origin, but first I want to give some evidence of what Mencken calls its “success.” In fact, without intending any hyperbole, he claims that O.K. is “the most successful abbreviation ever coined, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere.”
Nearby on my desk is a thick textbook, 10 inches high, 7½ inches wide, battered, edges stained from sweat and dirt, with the word LITERATURE in white letters on the faded brownish-orange cover. Just above this word, in smaller letters, is the phrase “An Approach” to. The book’s full title, AN APPROACH TO LITERATURE, is printed horizontally in white block caps on the binding, a dark gray-green color that curls an inch onto the front and back.
This phrase took me aback. Not that I hadn’t already been happily startled by other passages in the book where I’d come across it: David Bentley Hart’s brilliantly, playfully pugnacious The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, and Bliss. But somehow the phrase I’ve used as my title stood out for me.
I’d been thinking for a while about the time and place of where I grew up—in rural Minnesota in the 1980s, in the middle of what came to be called the farm crisis. For my MFA program, I had written an essay exploring one or two aspects of the experience. Then right at the end of my program, my father had this huge meltdown, his whole nervous system was just shutting down.
W.H. Auden’s phrase, “poetry makes nothing happen,” has been misinterpreted: instead of saying that literature is ineffectual, Auden was simply resisting the idea that literature should be reduced to propaganda. Indeed, a couple lines below the phrase Auden writes that poetry “survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” Literature, in short, doesn’t put up barricades; it is, rather, a “mouth” that makes the “nothing” of words happen.