Tag Archives: poetry

A Crestomathy of Crescendos

Posted on July 25, 2023 by JMN

From prose pieces published in Poetry, July/August 2023: Douglas Kearney, “On Spite: Folly Comes Daily” … Kit, who pokes at poetry with a long sharp stick to make certain it’s dead before skulking past it… *** Elisa Gabbert, “On Self-Pity: … Continue reading →

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Kevin Young: ‘Usher’

Posted on July 22, 2023 by JMN

…The dead wake for nothing.Or wake & nothingis still there. The wide meadow. Deep grass.Distant ships.The far fires Only glimpsedfrom a distance.Nothing looks back, blinks twice.…(Kevin Young, from “Usher”) That “blinks twice” produced a red-letter reading moment for me, a … Continue reading →

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Saskia Hamilton: Escapement

Posted on July 18, 2023 by JMN

… And yetthe escapement enforces its circleof unbreakable numbers… Sakia Hamilton’s verse “From ‘All Souls’” in Poetry, July/August 2023 refers to a pocket watch in a cupboard. Dancing with a technical term in a poem is a wily achievement. Words … Continue reading →

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Eco-ing How to Read Poetry

Posted on July 16, 2023 by JMN

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away. The same thing is true of poetry. Just recall how unbearable poems … Continue reading →

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A Reader Is a Buyer

Posted on July 15, 2023 by JMN

The horror vacui principle applies to messaging. A logodivergent text provokes suck-up from the reader’s own psychic aquifer. Demands are made, surmises enacted, leaps taken. A lucky text seduces its audience of one into a slow-reading entanglement. Is it the … Continue reading →

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Bradley Trumpfheller: ‘It Is Mica and Night Honey’

Posted on July 14, 2023 by JMN

There are poems whose gist I imperfectly apprehend. Putting such a poem into an acquired language can be a form of beaconing for bounce-back from latent referents. It’s therapy for bafflement. The drill induces closer confrontation with the text, on … Continue reading →

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Rowan Ricardo Phillips: ‘We Are Crowded by Presence…’

Posted on July 11, 2023 by JMN

Who is this Phillips person? — I wondered after reading aloud what had looked like a forbiddingly long poem in Poetry, July/August 2023. (The biographical note tells me what I dread knowing: He’s a distinguished professor of English!) The poem, … Continue reading →

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The Poem of ‘^Antara’ (6th Century A.D.)

Posted on July 7, 2023 by JMN

The text I use is from A.J. Arberry, Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students (Cambridge University Press, 1965). Arberry says the poem is likely not by ^Antara, but is in the spirit of “one of the greatest hero-poets of the … Continue reading →

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Snapshot of Crack Wordcraft

Posted on July 3, 2023 by JMN

This snapshot is from Poetry, July/August 2023. Midway through Wong May’s poem titled “The Last Film,” the speaker’s mother-in-law melts down briefly after a movie (“8 Women” by François Ozon) and a restaurant dinner (fried courgette flowers, salade Niçoise) with … Continue reading →

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Can We Park the ‘Passion’ for a Moment?

Posted on June 27, 2023 by JMN

… When the phrase I’m passionate aboutis trotted out like a mirror,I adjust the last of my hair,my dubious neck folded into my collar: a dirty wad of dollars.(Randall Mann, from “The Ritz,” Poetry, May 2023) Many are “passionate” about … Continue reading →

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