Tag Archives: poetry

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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‘L’avidité de tes muqueuses cannibales’

Posted on June 23, 2023 by JMN

Emilie Moorhouse’s translations of the verse of Joyce Mansour (1928-1986) in Poetry, June 2023, give full-throated voice to the satisfactions of the originals. Take the line from “Fever your sex is a crab” that serves as my title: Lack of … Continue reading →

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The Poem of an-Nābiḡa (Died ca. A.D. 604)

Posted on June 21, 2023 by JMN

In this complicated, ancient poem* I glimpse the life of squalid intrigue and dependency that was ever the courtier’s lot. At the mercy of the tyrant’s whim and the plots of competitors, his is a routine of flattery, complaint and … Continue reading →

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Sometimes I Miss the Forest for Dwelling on the Trees

Posted on June 17, 2023 by JMN

In reading “The ‘Change’ in Climate Change” by Jacob Shores-Argüello (Poetry, June 2023), I stiffened attentively at the following: … Because a year before,a hurricane reaved its way across this country for the first timein recorded history… The country is … Continue reading →

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A Tenacious Seeking of Certainty Sows More Doubt

Posted on June 15, 2023 by JMN

I’ve saved this passage by Kafka translator Ross Benjamin in my notes since early February. In re-reading it I realize anew how cogently it expresses my own experience of reading poetry, never mind translating it. It ends with a compelling … Continue reading →

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A Compelling Rationale for Taking Up Versifying

Posted on June 13, 2023 by JMN

Monet grew up in East New York in Brooklyn and started writing poetry when she was 8 because she was “fascinated by typewriters and people who would sit at typewriters,” she said. Monet fondly recalls her former college adviser: “I … Continue reading →

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Words, Words, It’s Always the Words

Posted on June 12, 2023 by JMN

These are the generations of mice… The phrase introduces each of three meaty stanzas in John Kinsella’s “Familiars” (Poetry, June 2023). The device, with its mock portentous sonority and homiletic repetition, has a pleasing (to this Jean-Luc Picard fan) Star-Trekkie … Continue reading →

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