EthicalDative

”A wild and capacious art” is how Adrian Matejka describes it. The editor of Poetry knows whereof he speaks, though I would hazard that other art forms besides poetry — opera, square dance, zither music — “belong” to their respective buffs, too. It’s an orotund assertion with wide application — the opposite of exclusionary.

Poetry spurns elitism, Matejka writes: 

It is “for the people,” as June Jordan taught us — despite the exclusionary positions of some critics. This communal posture is what makes poetry open to anyone who wants to engage with it as a writer or as a reader… 

Who doesn’t want to be enthused by a communal posture? In the rarefied world of poetry readership, two’s company, three’s a community. Widening the scope of what counts as poetry helps:

Some of the great poet-emcees like Rakim and Chuck D introduced me to the concept of poetry… They showed me… that poetry’s habits are universal and transferrable across mediums… It is malleable, transcending the strictures of its particular, versified container. 

Ryan Ruby* states the case less floridly:

All concepts are vague, but at present there is no consensus as to what poetry even is, how to define a poem, or who counts as a poet, which is perhaps why we have settled, a little uneasily, on a manifestly circular definition of poetry: a poem is whatever a person recognized as a poet says is a poem.

* Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

A poem by Danez Smith in Poetry, July-August 2025, titled “They/Them” should be read whole but, to be brief, starts:

said short: i feel more like a stud. said
with some nuance: as if i came to
masculinity through the women’s gate,
[…]

and ends:

of course you should address me in the plural.
said short: i am everyone. I am everything.
said shorter: i am.

There’s a focus on shrugging off gender-laden singularity in favor of an anonymizing plural. What language does is “build a room for living.” So talk about me as if about the nexus of “me’s” that comprise who I am, including the one I feel like, the “me” I live in. Give my personhood a “they” address.

Does that re-iterate the case? Where’s the harm, I ask myself, in respecting someone’s wish to be “said” in the plural? “Thou,” after all, by slow degrees got replaced by plural “you” in the mouths of the many as speech habits adapted to social behaviors. 

My impulse to skirt judgment, however, might have me treading water in what evangelical Allie Beth Stuckey calls “toxic empathy,” a misbegotten immersion in the feelings of others which needs tamping down with a dose of biblical tough love in her telling. The argument’s burden is: God made two sexes, separate, distinct, recognizable, immutable, arguably unequal. He said so textually in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, perhaps Latin, too. 

The English koine will sort itself on the matter in the fullness of time, as tongues do. Meanwhile, poetry runs rich and rife. Danez Smith sings of mad love in “Dear Time.”

[…]
i tie my time to you, to you who knows most intimately
what is wrong with me, who has seen me at my most naked,

ass out, my toothless ashy soul naked and cold
and shameful in front of god, what a thing, love, i am so happy

to be stupid this way. […]

The speaker’s grandma asks about the speaker’s partner: 

[…] what kinda mexican is he? and I told her
Venezuelan so now I call him Venezuelan-Mexican when I want to be cute.

Here’s a soaring, unvarnished take on the matriarch’s grandness:

and no this isn’t me canceling my grandma
because you, time, you cancel all grandmas, but she was speaking

within the limits of the language she has, pressing into that wall
for understanding and my grandma isn’t racist she’s difficult and careful

and nosey and serious and simple and a touch cold
and funny and a little mean and she spends her time in the kitchen

cause that work is how she loves us and she’s exactly the kind of poet
i want to be when i arrive deeper and frailer into time. […]

Who doesn’t want to be talked about like that when time lowers the boom?

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

There’s a cleanly spoken, elegant poem in Poetry, May 2025, that lingers in the mind’s eye. It’s called “Infinity Pool” by Vona Groarke. 

You flirt with an arresting occurrence in the liminal paralysis of semi-sleep. It nags. If not worded somehow, in your fully woken state it will have flown the coop. In Vona Groarke’s voice:

I had it in the night, the image,
but lacked the energy or will
to magic my body through
my own fourth wall and lower
myself, spit-spot, into the page.

Memory makes a stab, furrowing its brow. A visual conceit verges on recollection at a “just about” level of evanescence, like the lacery in foam etched on sand by a beached roller.

But I saw, I just about recall,
a blue rectangle not quite blank
held up against blue sky, blue sea
so you weren’t supposed to tell
the edge, the stitching, or the seams.

Say, a collage! The vision has coalesced into color, shape, backdrop: blue, primary hue that confines itself to distances; a shape with sides and corners, perceptibly edgeless; sky, sea.

“Infinity pool” is what it is — a luxuriant spa fixture, feat of engineered tomfoolery, extrapolated to an origami-like reminder pocketed for cherishing. I was stranded in the metaphysical until I caught the drift.

And I am folding it now, this pool,
corner to corner, line to line,
so as to carry about with me
its deep blue scrap of  lie.

Artfully deflating, conclusive irony: 

But carrying folded water
isn’t feasible. You know that.

Who’s “you”? Me? The poem talking to itself? The abrupt interpolation teases. What makes us human is eked out on scraps of lie, on our “knowing” the unreasonable — the ever-loving “hidden” and its haunted relatives. We carry water for our illusions. We feed them hermeneutically. They float somewhere beyond feasible, retrievable in our confabulations. I can’t say enough about “Infinity Pool” by Vona Groarke, or anything really. It’s damn near perfect.

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved