EthicalDative

First responders plunge into scenarios that need to be made sense of quickly. I call myself a first responder to poetry, and not a critic, but the poetry I read is published, so at least one other reader more qualified than I am has responded to it. I cling to the trope of first responder, nevertheless, because it excuses my ill-thought-out comments. A reader of novels can knock out 50 pages at a sitting, where a single poem can take all day if you let it. Treated as an emergency, perhaps an hour.

Is it fair to cite pieces of poems? Poetry magazine does so routinely on its back cover, so yes. Context aside, many poems have phrases or images which draw the reader to them. Why not notice those moving parts outright? Consider these excerpts from Poetry, January-February 2025.

I feared her blotchy wrath // that sometimes showed itself / and others / slept like something // without a hippocampus.
(“Mother’s Mother,” Khari Dawson)

They will never know / this zubaan of ours, / so let me put it this way: / in every version of this story, / I will wipe your spilt cereal milk / off the floor before any grown-up / can scream.
(“Appi’s Lullaby,” Sarah Aziz. Note: I think “zubaan” here is Urdu for “tongue,” meaning “language.”)

The first time / I tell someone I’ve thought about / ending it // is right after the first time / someone tells me they’ve thought about / ending it // and here we are suddenly feeling hopeful.
(“Dispatch from the Edge of the Universe,” Lesley Younge)

do // hold your untethered thoughts / unspoken and unheard.
(“boy laughs at my period-stained skirt,” Dianna Vega)

and the stars came out, and I watched, just beyond the path, / closing one eye and then the other, volleying that ancient light / between hemispheres.
(“Where the Sky Is,” Anya Johnson)

But later, alone in my room, / true love bloomed like Narcissus flowers once / on the pool of blue carpet, lips parting / in practiced prayer, petal soft and striving / stamen against the cool mirror
(“First,” Kate Hubbard)

After dinner, I wash the dishes, / look out the window. / I say / to the world: Captivate me.
(“Ennui When Watching the Ocean,” Yetta Rose Stein)

Somewhat related: I’ve heard that Emily Dickinson never used the word “lyric” in reference to the verses she wrote (some eighteen-hundred of them). She called them her “thoughts.” 

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

The two male scholars urgently want to talk about what’s dealt with in the Kama Sutra that’s not, um, you know, the sex part. 

BBC4 moderator Melvyn Bragg presses them, saying the sex part is why the book’s famous in the Western World. Could they kindly talk a little about it for the purposes of this British podcast? 

His entreaties founder on consternation and deflection. They insist the ancient masterpiece isn’t really about sex.

The female scholar masters the situation, stepping up with cool fluency to elucidate the erotic content of the Kama Sutra. For tapping the aquifer whence intimacy flows, she is up to snuff.

Within moments of writing the above, I read “Beach” by Maeve Marien-McManus (Poetry, January-February 2025). In this elliptic lyric a young woman connects with her capacity for sending back the male gaze reconfigured. She’s reached the aquifer, and then some, is the feeling it gives me.

Beach
by Maeve Marien-McManus

to me I bend their gaze &
I break it.
For the women on the shore I break it.

For once my young body stronger,
treading deep water,
men’s water. surrounded.

the men call & at distance,
I turn.
Our ocean.

I stare back.

My animal stillness snaps their tautness
a claim. For once, bender
not bended.

they shrink away. splash muttering away power,
power, now I own three gazes and now I know,
now I know. Inside I’m just power.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

The rest of Feranmi’s poem says this:

[…] Own a spot on a cliff or an edge
or somewhere that can carry a stamp of your body.
Become. Open a book and see this trapped time
I left for you to live all over.

“All over again” is the common voicing of that adverbial phrase. The writer’s omission of the final word is a canny stroke that lends broader reach to the poem’s ending.

Ascendent MAGA’s infatuation with the Putin-Xi-Orban-Meloni-Farage-Hogan mold of a man bodes ill in the near term for the love sadly labeled forbidden. “We’re going to unwoke the state,” says the new leader of the Wyoming State House, just to give you a flavor of what’s rumbling in the mountain meadows and high plains.

Still and all, be it that poetry makes nothing happen, as the poet wrote, poetry is happening smartly, nevertheless, in unconfined passion dimensions, and that’s not nothing. In fact it has long legs, because the poems featured in Poetry, January-February 2025, whose subtitle is Young People’s Poetry, are the work of cycle breakers who will outlive the administration’s dysfunction by decades.

There’s more tight craft, robust turns and singeing warmth in this issue than I was expecting. (I was going to say, “than I was prepared for,” but if I’m not prepared for it now, when? You prepare for poetry by falling down on your face in piles of it.)

Consider Vanessa Deering’s “so coffee is a laxative & i am writing this poem on the toilet.” That’s the title. The poem’s opening is a brisk setup:

in the building two women’s restroom & in the strangest places
i want to tell you the most mundane things
[…]

The singular “restroom” echoes what’s written on the door, not what syntax expects; it’s a tiny detail dropped precisely. The poem objectifies “what the sharpness of wanting you tastes like” around the extra squirt of vanilla in the speaker’s coffee proferred by a winking barista.

[…]
i finish my own sentences after walking you home
is it too early to say | my smile misses you? my smile’s smile | crescent
moony-gazed
[…]

In extolling the sheen of radiant eyes, the text resorts to the poetical adjective “gossamer” — best avoided, like “incarnadine,” in verse not meant to sound fusty — but the slip is redeemed by an ending I find revelatory:

[…]
like beesting,
i am afraid of my own swollen heart
i am so afraid for you

At first I read it as “beestings,” meaning the cow’s colostrum, a dense nutrient for the newborn calf. The context, however, suggests “bee sting.” The poem’s invigorating insight resides in the expressed fear of the heart beating in the speaker’s own breast, alongside the speaker’s fear for (!) the object of fresh attraction.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

I never knew why my uncle, a panhandle Texan, liked to say “the only good thing ever come out of Oklahoma was an empty bus.” He should’ve met Steve Leyva, who comes out of Oklahoma and is a good thing. Leyva’s poems, published in Poetry, December 2024, made me feel tossed in a blanket of strong language.

The one titled “Limerence” teaches me a word recognized in psychology for a kind of morbid craving directed towards a non-reciprocating person.

What do we call this desire
to be desired? The milkweed’s impenitent bow
to the monarch or starlight. The heart’s timpani

at a sundress, a thigh,
a braided anklet. A kind word escaping the cocktail
glass. An olive in brine. […]

The poem cycles through reasons not to adorn a self-flagellating longing with tags such as “beauty,” “love” or “happiness”:

[…] Name it beauty

and chase will become
our watchword. Call it love and the sun will kneel.
Say happiness and “Do I deserve this?”

follows, rapturous, like a sparrow
pecking the ground. […]

The chase after “beauty” calls to mind my French teacher’s mention of Proust’s l’être en fuite — the “entity in flight” whom the obsessive pursues precisely because the object of desire is unattainable. The sun’s kneeling at the mention of “love” is confounding. That the brightest body in our local firmament be deemed to humble itself before Cupid spikes the cheapened tag with hyperbole. Where “happiness” is concerned (“Do I deserve this?”), I do get a whiff of a certain kind of person in the grip of self-loathing who spurns entitlement even to a vestige of it. Deliver from, ye gods.

  The gnarly crux of the poem is what follows to the end. It posits a break-out strategy from self-torpedoing which begins with a stab at original thinking. Take the owl, folksy emblem of “wisdom.” Remember: The quest is to release the sufferer from limerence by an act of creative reassesment through naming.

[…] Instead of wisdom, why not
wish for the owl’s heart

at night, seeing in the dark
more than a meal, but a place to sing. […]

Yes, an apex predator of the avian persuasion will pierce something furtive and furry with its talons, tear apart and digest it before the sun rises. But hearty violence is followed by sated exultation. Let that be what it is: a restorative fallback on one’s own core of vitality.

Don’t imagine
a dirge for the eaten. Conjure

an exhale instead:
the hoot of being alive. Name it
whatever you like.

It’s almost an appeal to the bloody-minded revulsion over “woke”-ness that’s cresting in the likes of Wyoming. Break free of hackneyed sentiment and sloppy sympathies! “The hoot of being alive” is a bit of overreach, but Leyva’s entitled (he’s from OK).

I can’t process this text intellectually into crystalline clarity. It’s a poem, after all. It did, however, send a spark through me on first reading, and I pay attention to that. Perhaps I should have let it lie where it perched, darkly singing, but it ends with an imperative.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

The planet is bursting with verse. A reader of poetry has to be arbitrary to stay afloat. In this post I’ve done something impudent, which is to apply strikeout formatting to text which I think would have been better omitted. My emendations aren’t knowledge-signaling; they’re just a symptom of constructive engagement with interesting texts. I’m sure I didn’t invent this thought — a poet must have said it: Starting a poem is (relatively) easy; ending it is the trick. Music is between the rests; poetry between the silences.

The folio feature of Poetry, December 2024, is titled “The Chorus These Poems Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” I was braced for a “Latinx” experience. What I found is a sequence of high-performing poems that evade x-ing. I long to take more than piecemeal account of such feats, but see my above remark about the planet.

“Carnivore,” by Rigoberto González, has an italicized preamble referencing multiple sclerosis. The poem calls on the moose for a familiar emblem of sturdiness, but falls back on the gazelle: […] I’m supposed to be / upright and sturdy as a moose. / Better yet, a gazelle. I / used to walk so gracefully, / so elegantly in that animal / me. […] The speaker is prey to a wasting illness, but what’s central in the poem is loneliness over lost love: How my antelope nose soothed my buck’s / neck before he stotted away, / stomping out my heart […]. The poem’s conclusion is disarmingly specific:

He chewed it off just like
  I’m gnawing at the dead
gazelle of me. At night I detect
  thumping. Heartbeat or
hoofbeat, I can’t say. It creeps
  further away, memory of
a man who once loved me,
  hungering for the whole of me.
Oh I used to be more edible
  than this. And so mealy.

“Searching,” by Jordan Pérez, instantiates a vegetable garden at the end of its productive life. The drama is captured perfectly by the tomatoes: […] The tomatoes, / believing they were near death, rushed to birth / fruit, and the very production took / the last life from them. The poem pivots on a query somewhat misaligned along a “body” semantic: Can you show me a body that is itself / whole? The ensuing turtle anecdote picks the poem up and carries it to a soulful ending:

[…] I think daily about the spotted turtle,
who I found trapped under the boardwalk[,]
and carried back to the water, only to later
read that, if she’s moved too far, will spend
the rest of her life searching for her eggs.
How is it possible to define yourself by waiting
for someone you have never met?

“As Capitalism Gasps for Breath I Watch the Knicks Game,” by Yesenia Montilla, is a snappy fan paean to the New York Knicks basketball franchise: […] The ruckus of these players, the desire they / have to come in first. They rebound & strip like stickup / kids. […] The poem also reflects wryly on the anomaly captured in its title: […] Don’t get it twisted, capitalism is dying // & yet here I am rooting for boys bred to burn out their bodies / to make billionaires more billions. […] 

Here are the poem’s last 3 couplets:

What happens to the heart of a city when its people survive
on air; that space between the flick of the wrist & the swish

of a three-point buzzer beater? We fight for a win to fill
the ache of losing: Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Ayiti. We take

what we can, celebrate small victories until we win everything
we thought we never could—

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved