November, 2020

November: and post-Halloween, though still with plenty of tricks and treats in store, a word about this issue’s cover art, from Catherine Panebianco’s series, NO MEMORY IS EVER ALONE. I selected this image as one of an occasional but ongoing project: to capture the spirit of absence in these times when we have lost so many, so much. And I think tonight of Merwin’s little poem, “Separation”

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

A more apt expression of grief I can’t think of – yet containing in its “everything” the possibility, or at least not the prohibition of a future not altogether foreclosed, infused with memory, yet not bound by it. Such is grace, and I wish it for you all.

And with that, we turn to Joseph Campana’s analysis of “We Look at the World to See the Earth” Ed Robertson’s meditation on, among other things, the earth/world and out shared mortality.

We Look at the World to See the Earth
Ed Roberson

We look at the world to see the earth,
at the silver, pedestal-ed globe to see the grounds,
we see what we’ve done with it, what it has
to do with, we see our face bent to a surface;

but what of the world is seen in looking at the earth
any more than the world’s measure of minute to a rock
looking, but seeing gets
a return            begets return   gets returned:
the rivers come back, the salmon

We look upon the world
to see ourselves in the brief moment that we are of the earth
a small fern in a crevice of the cliff face

to see ourselves
in the brief moment
that we are
of the earth

to see the earth before the end of the world
the world

            is mortality, the earth goes beyond us
            is the ours of cosmos
            is our hour of cosmos

It’s been ages since anyone just handed me a book and said, “Read this.” I’d say that’s true even before the advent of this distanced world. Books are reviewed, and blurbed, ad infinitum. And someone will often say, “You might like this.” But as both a writer and a reader, I feel the shortage of late of those urgent moments when someone says, “You really need to read this.” No one handed me Ed Roberson’s extraordinary To See the Earth Before the End of the World, but I was lucky enough to hear Fred Moten speak this summer, and it was as if he was reaching through the screen and handing it to me.

I’m interested in the way an evocative phrase echoes in a poem, resounding like it might become a chant or a refrain. Suddenly is it as if some of the lines of a poem are spoken by a chorus. The title, To See the Earth Before the End of the World, becomes in this poem “We Look at the World to See the Earth.” A phrase that’s interesting enough to repeat is usually interesting enough to vary, to pattern meaning like the shapes of frost on a window. This phrase is particularly captivating. These two titles, and the difference between them, depends on another difference. What is a world? What is the earth? What is the margin between world and earth? That also means that this poem asks us to attend to common words. The more we look at them, the more we wonder if we ever understood them.
It all start, in the poem, with an intention and a perception: “We look at the world to see the earth, / At the silver, pedestal-ed globe to see the grounds, / we see what we’ve done with it.” So there’s another term that arises: globe. What’s a world? What’s a globe? What’s the earth relative to them? Worlds are made by people, individually or collectively. Globes arise from how we see worlds or even planets. Then, there’s the earth, and as we contemplate these large-scale ideas, we’re forced to focus on “what we’ve done with it.” Or better yet, what we’ve done to it. Look anywhere at local damage and it is as if we see the face of a larger unity staring back at us. Being successful in the world, which is made by and for humans, seems to mean not seeing the earth. Perhaps it is a delusion. Perhaps it’s a paradox:
“what of the world is seen in looking at the earth / any more than the world’s measure of minute to a rock.” World and earth as perspectives, points of view. From one vantage, the other is obscured and yet to seek one is to try to see the other. That’s the paradox.

Even that paradox seems to change as does the central phrase in the poem:

We look upon the world
to see ourselves in the brief moment that we are of the earth
a small fern in a crevice of the cliff face

Now we are brief moments which are also ferns scrabbling for purchase in the ancient solidity of rock, which is to say the inexorable earth that may not be forever but will outlast us and whatever worlds we fashion. No doubt that’s why refrains like, “Save the planet” make little sense. Something will remain, the planet will remain, however we destroy ourselves and others. Flannery O’Connor’s evocative title, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” has perhaps never made so much sense.

I suppose I wonder, too, reading this poem, how much we make mirrors of our surroundings. Other people, other creatures, sure, but also globes, worlds, planets. We constantly look “to see ourselves”

in the brief moment
that we are
of the earth

When is that brief moment seems an ever-more urgent question, a question more important, perhaps, than what we might also feel before these lines. That feeling is sadness. Only a brief moment? Perhaps. Let us hope the brief moment is not before it is too late with respect either to catastrophes unfolding around us or within the all-too slender scope of our lives. “Just before the end” isn’t so comforting.

No doubt this is why that word “mortality” hovers at the end of a lyric that ends as it began, with a variation on the poem’s title that gives us the title of the volume.

to see the earth before the end of the world
the world

            is mortality, the earth goes beyond us
            is the ours of cosmos
            is our hour of cosmos

If we see the “ours” of cosmos as only an hour—another little piece of brevity—then we are still the fleeting creatures we have been since likely the origins of poetry. As so many like to point out, mortality feels a little difference in the shadow of a planet that is already hospitable to life and likely will be more so in the years and decades to come. But Roberson still imagines a “we”: it is one of the strongest words in the poem. Mortality is shared. Whatever is “ours” may nestle within only an “hour.” Maybe that’s enough time to really see and, even, perhaps, to see a little hope.

See also,  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ed-roberson and   http://www.edroberson.net/

Once more: If you enjoyed Joseph Campana’s piece in this newsletter, and last month’s — and how could you not?  — all of the Plume newsletters are now archived under, well, Archives, on our homepage.

Something else?

Ah – after thanking the contributors to the next print anthology, Plume Poetry 9, for their “extra” work, probably I should elaborate. The anthology, to be released in April, will be presented in a new format, wherein 45 “established” poets (for want of a better designation} will offer a poem, then briefly introduce another “less established” poet’s poem. It’s my hope that turning the spotlight, as it were, on these too-little known poets will increase their readership. And the poets selected – for any of a dozen reasons — have been in my reading – uniformly, astonishingly good. I think this infusion of new blood will be invigorative; I know I haven’t been as excited about a Plume anthology since the very first one – as I wish you will be. If this format is as successful – as interesting, as useful – as it is in my imagination, we will continue it in upcoming volumes. It seems to me it offers the best of two worlds – work from those poets we have come to think of as modern masters, and those who, some of them, will be immediately recognized as such, or one day join them in that company.

Also, after my several reading recommendations in last month’s newsletter, a number of contributors and readers have contacted me with their own “lists.” It occurs to me that, should you like to send in a title or two, prose or poetry, I ‘d be happy to make room for them in upcoming newsletters.

Our cover art this month is Catherine Panebianco’s “Momaid”, from No Memory is Ever Alone.  For more information on Ms. Panebianco  a good start might be made  here 

Finally, as usual, several new/recently/forthcoming releases from Plume contributors:

Michelle Bitting                           Broken Kingdom

Sharon Dolin                              Hitchcock Blonde: A Cinematic Memoire

Sydney Lea
and James Kolchalka                 The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy: An Illustrated Epic

Mark Wunderlich                        God of Nothingness: Poems

Jeff Friedman                             The Marksman

Joyce Peseroff                            Petition

Khal Torabully
tr Nancy Naomi Carlsson            Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude

That’s it for now – I do hope you enjoy the issue!

Stay safe!

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume