“Poetry” Articles

“The stations of the cross” is a Roman Catholic devotion in which fourteen scenes depicting Christ on his way to crucifixion are recalled and pondered: his scourging, for instance, or his encounter with Pilate. Morrissey’s poem is titled Stations of the Cross (no “the”), suggesting parallel sites where “the cross” may be found. In addition to the immediate reference to Jesus’ historical suffering one may also read an implied immediate environment of school violence and beyond that innumerable instances of scapegoats and victimization in the wider world.

I’m browsing my poetry shelves looking for poets I haven’t read in a while. And there, practically jumping into my hand, is E. E. Cummings’s Poems 1923-1954. I also found him in both my editions of The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950 and 1976). And right away in the Oxford selections I come to his poem about driving his new car.

I picked Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 mostly because, at the time, the sonnet’s edgy tone about the drive to tamp down the earthly passions–—something I was personally dealing with at the time!-—cohered to my own struggles. I scrawled the poem in cursive on notebook paper over and over, trying to memorize it, and in memorizing it, it became a part of me—a part of my body, really

The literary critic Stanley Fish has lamented that when poets are not taught in classrooms, they cease to exist. That’s extreme, but there’s some truth to it, and among modern American poets, a case in point is Robinson Jeffers. He’s rarely on syllabi, and it has been this way for a long time. But at his best, Jeffers is a powerful Nature poet. He’s well worth reading, studying, and learning from.

Close-reading any poem by Wallace Stevens can look like hard, dizzying work, but it can become a happy romp rather than a baffled slog if you can do it with a friend who loves language as much as you do. I know this because I have such a friend, one whom I recently invited to Zoom with me through Stevens’s “Note on Moonlight.”

Here’s a poem by Yvor Winters (1900-1968), written during World War II, when California was on guard against possible attacks by the Japanese navy and air force. I’d like to lead you through this poem, and share a lesson I learned from reading and thinking about it.

Turning: an, if not the, essential act of Jewish life. Teshuvah, we call it. Repentance, it’s translated. “Teshuvah,” writes Rabbi Alan Lew, is “a Hebrew word that we struggle to translate. We call it repentance. We call it return. We call it a turning. It is all of these things and none of these things. It is a word that points us to the realm beyond language, the realm of pure motion and form.”

Scott Cairns’s new poetry collection, just published by Slant Books, is called Correspondence with My Greeks. The title is intriguing. “Correspondence,” of course, has a dual meaning: “communicating with” but also “connection or similarity to.” I think both meanings are at play in this collection. What Cairns gives us in this volume are seventy-eight such conversations (correspondences) as connections.

What I began to do was to pore over the Greek of the original, compare my own impressions with existing translations—where they existed—and in a crazy mixture of line-stealing, argumentation, agreement, and general response to what came to mind as I read the Greek and the English versions, I answered these poets with poems of my own.

The title poem of Suzanne Nussey’s debut poetry collection, Slow Walk Home, comes at the end of the book’s first section, called “My Father’s House.” In the poem “Slow walk home,” she is a young child walking with her father on his weekly visits to parishioners. On their way back home, she muses ominously “This day / an empty tablet not yet tipped / toward calamity.”

I suggest a sub-genre of dead-cat-in-a-well poems, even though I have only discovered two instances so far. In both poems, a grandfather lowers his young grandson down into a well to clean it, dredging up a dead cat in the process. The recently deceased North Carolinian Fred Chappell, may he rest in peace, provides our first instance, titled “Cleaning the Well,” published in his 1975 collection River . The Alabama-born Paul Ruffin offers a second instance. His poem, also named “Cleaning the Well,” appears in his 1980 collection Lighting the Furnace Pilot.

We are equal in our mortality: mother, father, me, you, bosses, employees, friends, strangers, enemies. Enemies: I have a hard time believing that anyone is an enemy. A competitor, yes. Wealthier than I am, yes. More talented than I am, yes. More accomplished than I am, yes. Smarter than I am, yes. Jealousy, envy, self-doubt: that’s what I feel when I see others this way.

Thomas Hardy’s novels are well-known and widely studied, and some of them, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), have become even more popular through film and TV-miniseries adaptations. Hardy is so rewarding as a novelist, that we tend to forget he’s an outstanding poet as well. He wrote close to 1000 lyrics.

Juturna’s is one of the bravest laments I’ve ever read in Classical literature. And it’s one I’d never come across until a year or so ago when I decided, after too many years of delay, to read all of Virgil’s Aeneid, from beginning to end, in Latin. Alas, my Latin was and remains very rusty. But rustiness can be an advantage. It’s slowed my reading down, forcing me to dig deeply into each passage and savor it, with the result that details stay in my mind much more firmly.

This year’s first seder: with strangers. Not exactly strangers. Poets. I knew the work of a few of them. One is a dear friend. Two spouses, one of whom is my wife. Sitting down at the diaspora seder table—(diaspora Jews hold two seders; Israeli Jews, one)—,I assumed most if not all of the twelve of us were Jews. Strangers? Not exactly.

Professor David Ferry probed each poet’s words, noting details, asking questions about them, keeping his students focused and vigilant, pointing to a surprise, a turn in syntax, an implication in an image overlooked first time through. I never heard him speak about Stevens’s “The Death of a Soldier,” but I imagine he would have discussed the brevity of the poem in relation to the large solemnity of the title, the short lines, the choice of a four-stanza structure, the relation of each stanza to the next, even the punctuation.

The poetic bookends which span thirty years of Robert Lowell’s life’s work, the first poem of Lord Weary’s Castle, “The Exile’s Return,” and the last poem of Day by Day, “Epilogue,” have a lot to say to us today. Considered together, they shed light not only on Lowell’s development as a poet, but also on what it means to be possessed by a religious-artistic vision.

Some readers have asked: who is the you? I hope it’s not greedy to have “you” mean multiple things! First it speaks to the reader, the “you” who’s invited into the book. In some of the poems “You” addresses the Divine. And in other poems the “you” is addressed to the friend, a character in the book. Finally, “Matters for you Alone”: not only meant for a single person, but also for someone literally by himself: a solitary reader.

It’s a pleasure to reread and analyze this first quatrain of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, looking at it and listening to it, the puzzles it generates and the questions it raises, and I am tempted to proceed to the rest of the sonnet. But in this post, I have another purpose, and that’s to quote and pay tribute to William Empson’s interpretation of the line about “choirs” in chapter 1 of his 1930 masterpiece of literary criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity.

Mother is gone, but compassion is still here. “[T]his encircling compassion,” Brian Volck calls it, rachamim, in his as-of-yet unpublished poem “A Goy’s Guide to TANAKH Hebrew: Rachamim.” Tanakh is the acronym for Torah (The Five Books of Moses), which with Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings), are the three major parts that make up the Hebrew Bible.