Newsletter #164 April 2025

May 24, 2025 Christina Mullin

PLUME

Bad Brains, 10.20.82

April , 2025

Welcome to Plume Issue #164,
April, and, as it is Poetry Month, I thought: Why not a bit of puffery? And then, of course, the thought: Yes, A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925-2025, that will do nicely, to flag the contributions of some of our little journal’s better-known poets in hopes of a) perhaps inducing you, readers, to spread the word and b) impressing the donors. (Of which there are, needless to say, exactly one.) Anyway, here’s the list, in no particular order, of those who appear both in that esteemed compendium and Plume online or one of the Plume print anthologies: Sharon Olds, Stephanie Burt, Eavon Boland, Cornelius Eady, Rae Armantrout, Tom Sleigh, Dana Goodyear, Meghan O’Rourke, Linda Gregerson, Brenda Shaughnessy, Amit Majmudar, Patricia Spears Jones, Kimiko Hahn, Andrea Cohen, Ellen Bass, Deborah Gregor, Billy Collins, Paisley Rekdal, Simon Armitage, Albert Goldbarth, Garrett Hongo, Molly Peacock, Carol Muske-Dukes, Mark Doty, Ruth Padel, Jessica Greenbaum, Vijay Seshadri, Nina Cassian, Fred D’Aguiar, Mary Jo Salter, Mathew Zapruder, Timothy Donnelly, David Lehman, Peter Balakian, Thomas Lux, Stephen Dunn, Monica Youn, Barbara Hamby, Victorias Chang, Keith Waldrop, Diane Wakoski, Tess Gallagher, Ira Sadoff, Heather McHugh, Alfred Corn, Gerald Stern, Carolyn Forché, Robert Pinsky, Dorothea Lasky, Safiya Sinclair, Lawrence Raab, Stephen Dobyns, David Bottoms, Dana Gioia, Pamela Alexander, Alicia Ostriker, Mark Jarman, Linda Gregg, Phillip Levine, David St. John, Mary Jo Bang, Mary Ruefle, James Longenbach, Campbell McGrath, Susan Wheeler, Grace Schulman, Alberto Ríos, Alan Shapiro, Jorie Graham, Jean Valentine, Phillis Levin, Wislawa Szymborska, Maura Stanton, David Wagoner, Sherman Alexie, Ted Kooser, T.R. Hummer, Natasha Trethewey, D. Nurkse, Kwame Dawes, Rick Barot, Yusef Komunyaka, Sophie Cabot Black, Eliza Griswald, Major Jackson, Marilyn Hacker, Carol Moldaw, Cleopatra Mathis, Maurice Manning, Carl Phillips, Elaine Equi, Matthea Harvey, Bruce Smith, Jennifer Michael Hecht, W.S. DiPiero, Fady Joudah, Carl Dennis, Dean Young, Jane Hirshfield, Ricardo Rowan Phillips, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, Tomas Tranströmer, Arthur Sze, Rosanna Warren, Eileen Myles, Chase Twichell, Sandy Solomon, David Baker, Afaa Michael Weaver, D.A. Powell, Ilya Kaminsky, Erika Meitner, Kim Addonizio, Deborah Landau, and Juan Felipe Herrera. Whew! Aren’t we just all that? (No, I don’t imagine so.) Seriously, though — congratulations and much gratitude to all.Oh, and there’s this: Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living has been long-listed for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation – the translators in question being Dzvinia Orlowsky, a long-time Plume contributor, and Ali Kinsella. Hurrrah! And fingers x’d.

Okay. Let’s turn now to Associate Editor Joseph Campana’s serendipitous re-encounter with the poetry — and legacy — of Essex Hemphill.

Song for Rapunzel
by Essex Hemphill

His hair
almost touches
his shoulders.
He dreams
of long braids,
ladders,
vines of hair.
He stands
like Rapunzel,
waiting on his balcony
to be rescued
from the fire-breathing
dragons of loneliness.
They breathe
at his hips
and thighs
the years soften
as they turn.
How long must he dream
ladders no one climbs?
He stands like Rapunzel,
growing deaf,
waiting
for a call.

I first heard the poetry of Essex Hemphill in my first year of college. Let’s say it was 1992, a few years before some of the first encouraging treatments for HIV became widely used. Hemphill was a fearless poet and performance artist whose work explored what it meant to be gay and Black at a time in which HIV was mostly a death sentence. By 1995, before I had graduated, Essex Hemphill had died of AIDS-related complications.

I was not yet out, to myself or anyone else. Those men who were in fact my elders were dying around me, even though I didn’t know it. AIDS still struck terror for so many and shadowed my earliest understanding of my own desires. That it was irrational to worry that any kiss, any caress might be punished with death, didn’t make the feeling any less intense.

I went to a small college in a small town far enough from the cities. What pierced that bubble of refuge was Marlon Riggs Tongues Untied, which I saw in a queer film series and which featured Hemphill’s poetry. In the darkness of the theater, I sat alone, feeling mostly anonymous and therefore mostly safe (or as safe as felt manageable in a time when, as the title of Hemphill’s selected poems indicates, Love is a Dangerous Word.)

Those years feel far away now, but as I was browsing through a bookstore, I saw Hemphill’s Love is a Dangerous Word and had to pick it up. Of the many arresting poems, “Rapunzel” stood out to me. It’s hard not to be drawn to poems in which someone is saved. It is harder still not to be drawn to a poem in which someone saves you because you try to save yourself, even with the most improbable of methods (like, say, letting down your hair).

That may make the story of “Rapunzel” sound more hopeful and less strange than it is. For Hemphill’s poem, I think neither is really the case. His Rapunzel is a figure of frustration. This is a man who desires other men in a time when acting on that desire could be fatal. And yet how exquisite the qualities that awaken desire:

His hair
almost touches
his shoulders.
He dreams
of long braids,
ladders,
vines of hair.

The hair might draw someone to you, but it may not save you. It may mark you as a not sufficiently a man. In this we come back to a dilemma built into this fairy tale. What does being saved mean–finding your prince or finding yourself?

The danger comes from “fire-breathing / dragons of loneliness” although these are also the dragons of desire who “breathe / at his hips / and thighs.” The frustration of waiting tortures this Rapunzal. What happens when dreams are not just deferred–what if they are never realized? Solitude is necessary for the mind and the heart. But loneliness can be deadly. It can destroy our capacity to love. You could wait so long waiting to be saved. You could stand “growing deaf, / waiting / for a call.”

Hemphill does what so many poets do. He enters the archive of cultural stories, in this case a fairy tale, to transform that story into a cautionary tale of a sort. The body of Hemphill’s poetry indicates he did not just wait around, hoping to be saved. He wrote beautifully if also painfully about love and desire and death, making those cliches of poetry anything but cliche. He didn’t get to live long enough. And we didn’t get to read all the poems he might have written. But each poem he left is a tower to climb into for perspective. And he certainly did let down ladders and vines of hair to help us up.

For a biography of Essex Hemphill see the Poetry Foundation.

Ah, yes — What does being saved mean–finding your prince or finding yourself? Indeed. Perhaps both, the prince within and the prince without? Thank you, Joseph, as always.

Finally, as usual, some recent/present/forthcoming titles from Plume contributors:

Arthur Sze. I nto the Hush and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews,
Essays, and Poems

Mark Irwin. Once When Green

Derek JG Williams Reading Water

Hank Lazer. What were You Thinking: Essays, 2006 -2024 and Abundant Life:
New & Selected Poems, from Chax Press.

Nin Andrews Son of Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poems

That’s it for now, I think

As always – I do hope you enjoy the issue!

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume