Plume

Bruce Beasley on his Two Poems:

“Considering the Extraordinary Lateness of the Hour” is an eschatological poem (one facing the end-times) in both personal and political terms. “We’re not going back” was my favorite rallying cry of Kamala Harris’s campaign, and yet back we went, way way back. This poem hearkens to the desert wanderings of Genesis and Exodus, the eschatological encounter with the creator-god in wilderness, to confront the extraordinary lateness of human life in the face of heat domes, glacial collapses, violent windstorms, relentless wildfires. To look back on the ruins, as Lot’s wife does, is to be turned into a pillar of salt. This is also a poem about a more literal “retirement”—I retired in 2023 after thirty-one years as a professor of English at Western Washington University—and a more figurative one as I looked forward to the long “quickening/eschatology” of planetary life beyond the 1.5 degree centigrade global heating we have just experienced. The poem is a cry of exhaustion—I wanted the long breathless single sentence to suggest the long long way we have to go to even begin to repair the damages we’ve done— in the face of the backwards-turning of the 2024 election and all the “sub-/sublimities of our time” that have led to where we are.

“Quitclaim”: My father, who died when I was fifteen, appeared to me in a dream that felt more like a visitation or a vision, just before the Covid quarantine set in. Sitting in the back row at a poetry reading I was giving in the dream, he portentously and with tremendous intensity urged me to trace my Beasley ancestry one generation further back than I ever had. When I woke up and followed his command by combing through Ancestry.com, FamilytreeDNA, and dozens of other sites, I discovered the centuries-long ancestral home of the Beesleys in Goosnargh, Lancashire. And I found the Blessed George Beesley, recusant Catholic priest and martyr, tortured for his faith, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and drawn and quartered in Fleet Street, London, in 1591. The Covid isolation led me into a very obsessive genealogical search to try to locate every existing document of the Beesleys of Goosnargh. This poem tries to detail how that very human craving for an origin story that would make sense of everything crashes up against, sometimes, the past’s relentless refusal to give us the disambiguities we demand. I’m still searching, and will scratch that itch and find out that It someday.

Julie Bruck on “Three Poems”:

“The Scarf”: Poetry can’t change the past.  But sometimes, it can catch up to unanswered mail. I don’t recall ever having written a revenge poem before this, but oh, it did feel sweet!

“Lana Turner has Collapsed!” arose from the pleasures of rereading Frank O’Hara. His openness to distraction (or, shall we say, inclusion?) was an impulse I was warned against as a young writer. I understood why that was, and learned a great deal about concision from my teachers.  But now that I’m older than they were then, something’s been cut loose again— a kind of associative thinking that was intuitive to me as a younger person. I love a tight lyric, but some poems just need to be baggy. They need to spill things.

“Horse in Winter”: I haven’t spent quality time with horses since I was 17. But a particular horse took up residence in my heart, and never left. A (loose) pantoum felt true to how memory can plague and please, incessant, if unreliable. Mostly, incessant, especially in dreams. Recently, I received this blurry image via text message, with the words, “The sadness is real.”

I was, and remain this child.

Alice Friman on “Packing up the Journal”:

When I was forty-two I went to Greece alone–a duffle over my shoulder, new sandals, three T-shirts, jeans, and a yellow dress. I had no plans, no reservations except for my first days in Athens. I knew no one. I memorized the Greek alphabet so I could read street signs, that’s all. I went to find the place where all the things I loved were born and flouished–drama, sculpture, theater, beauty. I went to find out why. The guide book says it’s the Greek light, but I don’t know. The truth is I took a trip outside myself to find myself. Who was I after all? I had recently gotten a divorce after 3 kids and 20 years of marriage, a divorce I desperately wanted. My only companion a journal I kept religiously. I am ninety-one now, in the midst of preparing my papers for the University of Georgia Library archives. And here it is again–that journal from fifty years ago, that trip, that grand adventure, the best decision I ever made in my life.

Elizabeth Murawski on “Vocal”:

It all began years ago with Galway Kinnell’s poem “At Daybreak.” About starfish, which I love, and of course more than starfish. I love his poetry and his speaking voice, the kind like Richard Burton’s, so rich and mellow you could listen to him read a menu or the telephone book. I had found the poem online. I know that because it had an audio option. I read it several times. But here’s the kicker. I didn’t want to hear him read it. Not at all. It was this strange response on my part that led me to write “Vocal.” It was a place to ask myself why. I’d work on it, then set it aside. I have saved eight drafts as well as the Kinnell original. It got shorter but it wanted vacant lot baseball and Lincoln’s squeaky voice. Spilt milk. They were there early on. I kept shifting things around until it worked.

Hunt Hawkins on “Daniel Whipped at the Market, St. Augustine, 1849”:

My poem is one of a group I’ve been writing and calling “history poems.” They are about little-known traumatic events that raise questions of human nature and understanding. They are located in places I’ve lived or visited although I usually don’t add the complication of bringing myself in. Nonetheless, I’m convinced that all of our lives play out in the framework of history, even if we don’t know it.

This poem resulted from a visit to St. Augustine for a friend’s wedding when I happened to spend a morning on the downtown Plaza, once the location of its slave market. To its credit, the city has put up a monument honoring the 1964 civil rights protests there. But the market remains obscured. The poem’s question, stated plainly enough in the first line, is what makes memory. Memory’s most obvious enemy is simply time itself, which gradually effaces even stone monuments such as the Confederate obelisk. More immediate enemies are ignorance or outright suppression as with the trolleys that don’t want to upset the tourists. A final enemy is a lack of caring in the first place that fails to record complete details as with the Public Market File concerning Daniel. In today’s climate when politicians seek to sanitize and erase American history, astonishingly even the brute fact of slavery, it is important to remember our past as best we can, including that Florida in 1565 was the beginning of African slavery in what were to become the United States.

Scotia Gilroy on Translating “Summer with Monika” by Urszula Honek:

The poem “Summer with Monika” is taken from the poetry collection Zimowanie (English translation: Wintering) by Urszula Honek. It is her third book of poetry, published in Poland in 2021. The interconnected poems in Wintering are minimalist snapshots based on the poet’s experience of growing up in the rural landscapes of southern Poland. They employ a loose flow of associations in which overgrown gardens, dilapidated houses, crumbling walls, and dusty corners filled with memories and ghosts intertwine with an oneiric intensity. The poems create their own unique, microcosmic world that is full of friendship and nature, but at the same time eerie and desolate with an unsettling undertone of decay, betrayal, yearning, and impending death.

The constrained use of language employed in these poems belies a deeper emotional complexity than what is immediately apparent, and hints at a feverish layer of sensuality and anxiety just below the imagery’s surface. A liminal poetic space is created in which boundaries begin to blur between life and death, memory and perception, reality and dreams. Urszula Honek’s poems in Wintering explore both the beauty and melancholy of rural life, where the past lingers in physical spaces and the present moment always carries the weight of what has succumbed to tragedy. The moments of provincial Polish life described here—sometimes straightforward and mundane, other times bewildering and inexplicable—are captured as if under a magnifying glass, eerily exaggerating certain details and focusing attention on what often eludes us in the prosaic flow of everyday life.

I’ve been translating Urszula Honek’s poems over the past six months while sitting beneath a 150-year-old oak tree in my wild, overgrown garden in the ancient Central European city of Kraków which I now call home. I’ve let her poems sink deeply into my bloodstream, into my bones’ marrow, into the rushing currents of my cerebral rivers and tributaries. They resonate deeply with me, for I also had an anxious, restless childhood full of nameless yearning surrounded by rural wildlands and forests, but on the opposite side of the world­—near Vancouver, Canada. Urszula’s poems speak to me as if through an underground mycelial language and now, after a gestation period, each translated poem is emerging from its chrysalis to live a new life in the English-speaking world.

Steven Cramer on “The Eye That Desires to Look Upward” and “Two Ghosts”

I owe both of these poems to a search committee I served on, years ago, for an assistant professor in creative writing.  The candidate who turned out to be our top pick, and turned us down, began his presentation by writing the following twenty-eight words on the blackboard:

TRAP

After the last birds died the cage took off from the patio and began flying toward heaven. “It’s coming to ask our forgiveness,” thought the unwary angels.

None in our audience of five knew about the Argentine writer Enrique Anderson-Imbert (1910-2000), author of this astonishing example of his “microcuentos,” perfectly translated by Isabel Reade. We asked the candidate to pause so we could copy it down.

Appetite whetted, I searched out other Englished microcuentos.  Despite their many arresting, fabulist scenarios, none that I found lived up to Reade’s translation of “Trap”—which is prose that feels like a poem.  The other microcuentos, at least in English, were prose that felt prosaic. They didn’t have what poetry can’t do without: the sense of something palpably left unsaid.  Was Anderson-Imbert, then, a particularly maltreated victim of his translators, or a curious epitome of the one-hit wonder?

Lacking Spanish, I couldn’t pursue those questions.  Instead, the meddler in me tried coaching some of Anderson-Imbert’s prose fables into verse, hopeful that the infrastructures of stanza and line—and the junctures between lines and stanzas—could create spaces for the spaced-out logic at the heart of these little stories.  Twenty-one of them will make up a chapbook titled As If: Variations on Enrique Anderson-Imbert, forthcoming in September.  Of the two in this issue of Plume, “Two Ghosts” compresses but hews fairly closely to the original’s scenario. “The Eye That Desires to Look Upward” borrows the original’s first line then exits the premises, taking its title from my first collection.

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