Tag Archives: poetry

‘Digging Everywhere Until Things Gave’

Posted on September 29, 2024 by JMN

Adjacency can have a downside when it sparks comparison. “Praise Song for Annie Allen” by Angela Jackson is published alongside Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Memorial to Ed Bland” in Poetry, September 2024. The juxtaposition drives home for me how brightly Brooks shines … Continue reading →

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THAT God: The Argument With Him (or Them)

Posted on September 11, 2024 by JMN

Christian J. Collier publishes three poems in Poetry, September 2024: “God,” “Case Study” and “The Compline.” Spoken cleanly, rhythmically, hotly, they orbit around experience gleaned from the crucible of propagating life. Formal religion can be heavy on bone and light … Continue reading →

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‘I Handed This…Singular Life Over’: Kate Asche’s ‘[Untitled]’

Posted on August 30, 2024 by JMN

The words of Kate Asche’s poem “[Untitled]” (Poetry, May 2024) enact a sac-like image on the page. Leapfrog the spaces between them and they (the words) hang together as if magnetized, flowing into shattering assertions. A life is lost in … Continue reading →

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On Rhyme and a Little Bit of Rhythm

Posted on August 28, 2024 by JMN

Reading current poems, I notice how rhyme seems mostly a thing of the past. Occasional rhyme and near rhyme can land felicitously nowadays, but when deployed lockstep it’s often noisy and distracting. To some degree the same is true with … Continue reading →

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Ciceronian Suasion: ‘Memorable in a Matter of Minutes’

Posted on August 21, 2024 by JMN

May we be guided by hope, joy and a fierce moral imagination.(Rabbi Sharon Brous) Anyone who watches Buttigieg on Fox News knows he can boil things down with terrific lines, and it’s being memorable in a matter of minutes that … Continue reading →

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‘I Said Hello. Then You Said You Said Hello’

Posted on August 13, 2024 by JMN

I’m guessing you think there’s a typo in my heading. I know! The use of repetition in “The Renaissance,” a poem by Trey Moody (Poetry, May 2024), was a hook for me. The thirteen-line poem starts here: I said hello. … Continue reading →

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The Few, the LOUD

Posted on August 1, 2024 by JMN

The elbow room in ivied halls of bard raptureHas the vastness of atomic space.Let ring lute! — Recorder, mandolin and dulcimer.Let move your lips with mine while reading silently.Let BE our noise! Be louder than it sounds! A sub-segment of … Continue reading →

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‘Plastic Is This Zombie Medium’

Posted on July 30, 2024 by JMN

Verse can have visual ramifications as well as verbal ones. Text commandeers white space on the page in one-off patterns reflecting a close collaboration between author and typographer. The ensemble is larger than the words which are its literal medium. … Continue reading →

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‘Tested in the Wrack Wrack of the Parlance’

Posted on July 20, 2024 by JMN

… I want to say / this is how it started: / there was a mystery / it begged / to be stroked(Alexis De Veaux, “For my love at the time of our ceremony,” Poetry, July-August 2024) “YxzY” by Ronaldo … Continue reading →

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Raise Your Hand If You’re Up for a ‘Variety of Irreconcilable Points of View’

Posted on July 10, 2024 by JMN

Rooky move: I responded to the first page of Meghan O’Rourke’s essay “On Ambivalence: To Be, but to Be How?” (Poetry, June 2024) before I had finished reading it. I caught the wave generated for me by her allusions to … Continue reading →

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