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