Newsletter #165 May 2025

May, and, why not take the opportunity here to extend my gratitude to the Plume staff, without whom, of course, our little journal would soon be shipwrecked. You can find them here – and I must say, quite a stellar group — generous, gifted poets and scholars all. But, for now – others will follow in due course — I want to spotlight just one, Translations Editor. Mihaela Moscaliuc.  An invaluable resource, whose connections have done a long way in making Plume something of the international journal I always hoped it would become, she is also, as you’ll discover below, a terrific poet, whose work has and will appear in greater length in our pages soon. Oh – and Dr. Moscaliuc has been awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. Brava!

Deep Cut: Homecoming
Romania, 2022
When you return, a year later, the hillside’s denuded.
The last of its timber, stacked by the roadside,
will become, by winter, a politician’s
second summer home, this one raised
for the mistress who threatens blackmail.
For now, it waits for the passerby, preferably Roma,
who’ll subtract a log or two to keep his family warm.
The village cop is on the lookout. He doesn’t want
a second home. He wants to send his son to school
in Germany. He wants stamps on papers.
He wants hard cash.
The man who won’t
get to burn the log in his fireplace
will be made to feel lucky he got away
with just a fine, a misdemeanor,
his face splayed in the local paper.
So the town rests assured the perpetrator
has been punished. It believes what it wants:
that the man with a hand ax lugged away the forest,
left the hillside barren, forced the wolves into town.
He is, therefore, also responsible for the bear
trampling through the supermarket, and isn’t it ironic,
the reporter adds, given the historical evidence,
the man being of the kind who once trained
the beast to dance.
The timber’s on its way now,
and logic’s irrelevant. Your anger, too, irrelevant.
You abandoned. You’ve been writing poems.
You are breathing a different air. You don’t
get to choose what you return here for.

*First published in The Gettysburg Review, 34:2, 2023, forthcoming in Heartmoor (Alice James Books 2026)

As I say, a gifted poet, as I hope – think —  you agree.

Okay. Let’s turn now to Plume contributor Marilyn Johnson’s marvelous interrogation of a certain… epistolary imposter.

I detected an unfamiliar voice in my inbox recently, an interloper who assumed a position in the loading zone between me and my new emails. In the column where I glimpse the first few lines of my incoming messages—I hope you went home to a hot bath. Very glad to be with you and share in the outrage—I read instead, “Protest enjoyable; now back to work.” Wait, that didn’t sound like my friend. “Protest enjoyable”—who says that?

Voice is everything to me, so I notice its absence. My correspondents, mostly poets and writers, have big, distinctive voices.

It’s yours to take but co-credit goes to Big Wally Stevens.

Will check the calendar and make sure I’m not talking through my witch’s hat.

Holy Stanza, Batman!

With such lively voices to chat with, I can’t help peeking in my inbox for a dose of cheer or sanity throughout the day—except suddenly I had to dig into each email to find the zingers and wit and drafts of poems; no quick hits of pleasure. “Enjoys project; suggests working on syntax.” This isn’t the language of poetry. “Enjoys project.” Who says that?

Also, how creepy to find myself, in my own intimate space, referred to in the third person. “Dogs can grow feathers; Marilyn reassesses approach to life.”

I sent a writer friend my revision of a dark poem about trapped girls called “I need the stories” and pointed out that I’d changed feet to shoes in one line. The whole thing baffled the bot. “Needs stories of girls’ oppression; J. confirmed getting shoes.” No. J. “got” the line about shoes—she didn’t get shoes.

Soon enough, I traced the problem to a software update. One of the preferences in Apple Mail had been returned to its default setting. To suppress it, all I had to do was open my preferences and uncheck the box called “Summarize Message Previews.” Problem solved—for the moment.

I’ve been ignoring the revolution in AI for years, trash-talking spellcheck and autofill (I meant amazing, damn it, not Amazon). But AI is suddenly everywhere I happen to be. The bots are beating me to the page with synchronic offers to do my writing. The blank page in Word has a shadow ad offering to help me draft with “Copilot.” I can’t start an email reply without AI offering to insert a canned reply instead. One of my literary correspondents sent me a risky and vulnerable poem. Almost every line was beautiful, and I hit reply to tell her that. Two possible responses were instantly highlighted under my cursor: “Sounds deep…” and “I’ll read it….” I clicked “Sounds deep…” in a dare and watched as two sentences materialized in the body of my reply. “This poem is very deep and moving. It speaks to the pain of betrayal and the struggle to find one’s place in the world.” Wrong_—and bad, with a false note my friend would have detected instantly.

I conclude, based on my weeks of inbox contamination, that AI is rubbish at reading poems. How is it at writing them? While a baseball game provided background noise, I fired up acres of servers, ordering poetry from ChatGPT and also the AI Poem Generator. They’re fast, I’ll give them that; they spit out lines speedier than I can type. Free verse about a balloon, anyone?

…it floated up,
a wish too soft to hold,
drifting away,
like something forgotten.

No?
How about a sonnet on the subject of rock ‘n’ roll:

O wild and wailing child of fire and steel,
Born from the blues, but raised on rebel cries….
The riffs still run like blood through hungry veins….

Holy Stanza, Batman! That’s as bad as the squib summarizing the email about this essay: “Marilyn to write 500-700 word poem for Plume.” That can’t be right. A 700 word poem?! O AI!

Anything else? I don’t think so.

So then — finally, as usual, some recent/present/forthcoming titles from Plume contributors:

Michael Simms               Jubal Rising: Poems

Phillis Levin                     An Anthology of Rain

Stanley Plumly                Collected Poems of Stanley Plumley
Edited by David Baker and Michael Collier

Chard DeNiord                Westminster West

Sophie Cabot Black        Geometry of the Restless Herd

Amy Gerstler.                  Is This My Final Form?

Martin Espada                Jailbreak of Sparrows

Joy Harjo                        Washing My Mother’s Body

As always – I do hope you enjoy the issue!

Daniel Lawless

Editor, Plume