Tag Archives: poetry

Christian Wiman: ‘Ars Poetica’

Posted on August 5, 2023 by JMN

2.These lost and charnel thoughtsless thoughts than bits of stunI suddenly find myself among;that are the me I am when I am notsleeked to reason and pacific despairspeak to me of a pain that saves,some endmost ear to shrive the … Continue reading →

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Who Was the Poet That Said…

Posted on August 1, 2023 by JMN

… Something like: The bird-of-paradise that’s flying up your ass is also flying up mine? You know how, now and then, you simply need a particular poem in order to carry on? “Marvin” something? I’ve tried to track down the … Continue reading →

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Etel Adnan: ‘Words Are Social’

Posted on July 26, 2023 by JMN

Lebanese-American painter-poet-novelist Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was interviewed by Gabriel Coxhead for the June 2018 issue of Apollo. In the 1970s, having returned to Beirut to work as a journalist, she was forced to flee to Paris when the civil war … Continue reading →

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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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