“Poetry” Articles

I’m reading Robert Cording’s latest poetry collection, What’s Possible: New & Selected Poems. In the “Selected Poems” sections, we get a survey of Cording’s long, celebrated poetic career, ranging from Life-List in 1987 through Without My Asking in 2019. Cording actually published a subsequent book that he doesn’t include selections from: In the Unwalled City (2022). The reason for this omission is that the section of “New” poems in What’s Possible continues the theme of the 2022 collection: Cording’s grief over the recent death of his thirty-one-year-old son, Daniel.

I’ve always felt my work centered on the inextricable nature of joy and sorrow.  I’d say the selection of poems drew on three aspects: that for me the ordinary world is extraordinary; that what’s extraordinary is we live in a creation that need not be, but is; and that our work is, as Gary Snyder has said, to make the real world as real as possible.  To me that involves my attempts, however often I’ve failed, to see the world and not my “idea” of the world, as Wallace Stevens put it.  I have always felt the unearthly earthliness of the world I live in and I hope the poems I’ve chosen reflect that in myriad ways.

Yes, I know: a flat-out contradiction. How can space be eloquent? or speak at all? Space is a nothing, isn’t it? An absence. A way of indicating a separation. The words around it speak, not the space itself. But if you think that way, you’ll find yourself challenged to think otherwise by the recently published This and That: Short Poems of Zen Master Ryokan, translated by Stan Ziobro and John Slater.

Narcissus, one of many mythical figures in Latin poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is too important a character in our lives today to be dismissed as a word-jumble. That’s because Narcissus’s story forms the basis for the psychological malady called narcissism. It’s a malady characterized in one dictionary as “excessive interest in or admiration of oneself and one’s physical appearance.” Maybe close reading Narcissus’s story will help us figure out who is who the next time we look in the mirror.

When we read a poem closely, including its formal features, we may, if we are so inclined, experience the Divine in the poem’s details. If nothing else, when we read a poem closely, we encounter the brilliance of human creativity. And if that’s not a direct experience of the breath—or soul, another meaning of the word nishmat—of every living thing, the breath that the Divine breathed into each of us, I don’t know what is.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

If I handed you an essay called “The Poet,” you’d likely expect an analysis of, say, the poet’s meter or imagery and symbolism. But if the essay is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet,” you won’t find any of this. Rather, you’ll read that “it is not meters but meter-making argument that makes a poem.” And “Things admit of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol.”

During the summer season, when local peaches are plentiful, as we’d finish dinner I’d ask my husband “Do you care to eat a peach?” I knew I was playing on the line “Do you dare to eat a peach?”—from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” But after a while I realized that there was nothing else I remembered from that poem. I hadn’t read it in, literally, decades. So I pulled Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays from my bookshelf and opened the book.

Early on, I recall reading a lot of Robert Lowell’s poems, including his poem “For the Union Dead.” More recently, in addition to a large array of many other poets’ works, I’ve been paying attention to the work of Eastern European poets, including Miklos Radnoti, Milosz, and Adam Zagajewski. This is not definitive, though.