February, 2024

February, and — for a moment, let me draw your attention, as I rarely do, to a particular contribution in this month’s issue of Plume: Dzvinia Orlowsky’s and Ali Kinsella’s translations of Halyna Kruk’s new manuscript of poems titled Lost in Living, with a memorable headnote from Chard deNiord, from which I take these lines:

I was curious about how a poet in the midst of devastating war could write about both her country’s and her own personal losses with what William Butler Yeats called “a cold eye.” Kruk’s poetry rises memorably to the occasion of its subject matter with language that conveys a unique combination of empathy and original tropes that indict her country’s enemy accurately as simply dehumanized. A spiritual economy infuses her poetry as a poetic blessing that witnesses memorably to the devastation of her deceased and wounded countrymen and women: “the dead, you could say, live through us,” she writes, “feel through us, play out their games,/prove their theories through us,/convey what was not read and not understood/during life.

It is my — our — hope that you will agree to deNiord’s benediction.

And, perhaps, too, look again at our cover art, also from Ukraine by way of photographer Miki Fedun:

Though the photo is titled “Kyiv, 2017”, don’t they recall – these figures crowded haphazardly together, some headless, collapsing, nude, blanched – the  stunned ghosts of Hans Memling’s suddenly damned souls in his triptych, The Last Judgment?  Or a knot of stupefied arrivals at Birkenau? Yes, they seem to say, catastrophe catches us each unawares, is never far away.

Again, one thinks of de Niord: It’s impossible for those far removed from the Russo-Ukrainian War [or any foreign war], as we are in America, to imagine both the emotional and physical trauma Ukrainians experience daily. A sturdy truism, of course. Yet, thanks to Kruk and her translators, however, maybe a little less impossible…

[And, this just in: A National Endowment for the Arts Literary Translation Fellowship has just been awarded to co-translators Dzvinia Orlwosky and Ali Kinsella, for their work on Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living. Congratulations!]

Okay.

Let’s turn now to Brian Culhane’s astute appreciation of Mark Jarman’s great poem “The Arrow Paradox”.

On a recent trip to Marfa, Texas, one night my wife and I joined a star-watching party at the nearby Macdonald Observatory, where we rotated through viewing stations, taking turns gazing at distant spheres. There I learned, looking at Jupiter, that it was eleven times larger and spun twice as fast as our own planet, and that, the docent informed me, were I suddenly transported onto its wind-pummeled surface, I would instantly be flattened to the width of a piece of paper. (That would not, presumably, be my only problem.) Gloved and bundled up, I looked on, awed by interstellar distances impossible to imagine—even when calculated in light years, a term with more than the tincture of the poetic: the reach of light.

Which may explain why it was that Shelley’s lines floated into my mind: “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,/Stains the white radiance of Eternity….” On a frigid crystalline night, I wondered about that simile: why see life as staining eternity? Was it simply that, for Shelley, mortal lifespans appeared so shockingly abbreviated, pathetically brief, compared to a never-ending duration of time? Maybe. Yet how else could we begin to conceptualize the extent of eternity, except in comparison to our own lives, which Robert Lowell calls, in the last poem of his last collection, “poor passing facts”? Endlessness resists our envisioning. Even were we to accept Dickinson’s belief that “Forever – is composed of Nows—”, what would her version of eternity look like? Or so I wondered, peering into an impressive telescope and failing to see beyond Saturn’s rings.

Infinity, like eternity, similarly resists our sight, especially since mathematicians tell us differing orders of magnitude exist between sets of infinite numbers (some sets are larger than others, weirdly enough). And then there’s Zeno’s famous paradox of the arrow, whose flight crosses space that can be infinitely subdivided, along its arc, into a never-ending series of increasingly smaller units, making an arrow’s motion—and all motion, by extension—seem quite impossible. Which makes for a logical paradox, which the philosopher Marcel Danesi explains as an absurd consequence that follows from apparently reasonable assumptions, or what he terms an experiment in non-linear thinking.

A poem by Mark Jarman, in his recent collection Zeno’s Eternity, offers readers an object lesson in non-linear thought:

“The Arrow Paradox”

Zeno sent
his arrow flying
endlessly from point
to point along its arc
to make a point
about eternity:
getting there is tricky.

That’s what I think
anyway, as snowflakes
stall in the morning’s
freezing air
like seed fluff
reluctant to drop
anchor in the ice.

I’m watching that
tentative descent
though I’m in motion
and counter-motion
even as I follow
my pen’s blue notes
and think I’m not—
not doing anything,
not going anywhere
much farther
than my own flight
across the blank
momentum
of the turning page.

In the first stanza, the arrow may be “endlessly flying,” unable to cross an infinite series of points, but according to Jarman, with a fine ear for a pun, the paradox’s point concerns the possibility of reaching eternity, even if “getting there is tricky.” Of course, the poet knows Zeno’s paradox, ever since Aristotle grappled with it, concerns motion and infinity, not eternity, but the latter better suits a poet who typically finds spiritual meaning, and often biblical undercurrents, in the quotidian. Figurative language is to Jarman as absurdity is to the logician, providing unusual ways of getting from point to point to make a point. Take those reluctant snowflakes, which like seed fluff, hang suspended in the freezing air. I’d never thought snowflakes and seed fluff could be thus likened—whether dropping anchor in ice or stalling in mid-flight—but now I can’t imagine not seeing these similitudes. Somehow Jarman has made me see as inevitable the unforeseen.

While it begins with his looking out the window, the poem subtly focuses on the poet looking at how his pen is moving, making blue ink notes that, like those snowflakes, descend or tentatively hang suspended for a time, before dropping anchor on the page. The poet’s mind is thus in motion and counter-motion, which would explain his hesitancy, as perhaps he looks back to earlier notes, revising, adding and subtracting, while all the while moving—if he’s successful—ultimately ahead. On the page, however, ahead also means across, as writing is linear, and down—and quite often back up. It’s a wonder any writing ever gets done; indeed, Jarman feels he’s “not doing anything/not going anywhere,” paradoxically,

much farther
than my own flight
across the blank
momentum
of the turning page.

Now we’ve returned, circuitously, to the image of the arrow in non-flight, though here it’s the poet whose mind’s in dubious flight across inner space. Or, more literally, whose pen moves across a page, which itself is turning with what Jarman, with metaphysical wit, describes as “blank momentum.” Has the page’s momentum started, only to stall, because the writer has drawn a blank? Or perhaps it’s the not-yet-written-upon (blank) page that’s provided momentum for its own turning, a force given an extra push by the reader, who now wants to know where the poet may be heading. No worries there, for one lovely aspect of “The Arrow Paradox” is how deftly its drift of thought descends, sinuously, from line to line, Jarman’s voice ferrying us from stanza to stanza, until a period marks the endpoint of this pointedly paradoxical poem, one which seems slight only because of the poet’s elegant sleight of hand.

I’m told, and I believe it, that the earth is perpetually turning, and gravity is holding me down, and stars are both overhead and under me, and Saturn’s rings may have been born from the collision of two moons hundreds of millions of years ago. Only now do astronomers believe dark matter makes up the preponderance of outer space, though its properties are barely grasped. The arrow of our imagination is ever passing through voids of knowledge; the ineffable greets us everywhere. Yet, once in a blue moon, I happen upon a poem like Jarman’s that illuminates, however briefly, such paradoxes of being. And brings more than a bit of joy.

Other news: Look for Plume on Instagram — @plumepoetry. We’ve begun to up our presence there, and would love to have you follow us.

Finally, our habitual nod to a few of our contributors who have books recently published, soon-to-be, or fresh acceptances.

Penelope Pelizzon              A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye 
Gloria Mindock                   GRIEF TOUCHED THE SKY AT NIGHT
Fady Joudah                         […]            
Dan O’Brien                         True Story: A Trilogy
Steven Cramer                    Departures from Rilke
Deborah Landau                Skeletons
Jean Valentine                   The New and Collected Poems of Jean Valentine
Peter Cooley                       Accounting for the Dark
Philip Metres                       Fugitive/Refuge
Terese Svoboda                 The Long Swim and Roxy and Coco

That’s it for now – be well — as always, I hope you enjoy the issue!

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume