Weaver, Mort and Threefoot, et. al.

Elizabeth Weaver on “What Was Left Out,”:

This poem started after a period of time when I hadn’t been able to finish anything new for quite a while. It was summer, just a few months into the pandemic, and Lynn Melnick was conducting an online poetry workshop. I don’t remember the exact writing prompt that she gave us, but it had to do with giving voice to our stories and what can or does get “left out” when we tell them; that was definitely in the phrasing. In any case, this poem became the result.

At the time when I started the piece, what would later become my book-length manuscript (for which I would subsequently be chosen as a National Poetry Series finalist) was just a scattered jumble of many, many years of poems that I’d written. I wasn’t sure at the time how much of my work would make sense grouped together as a book, but “What Was Left Out” certainly ended up being part of a narrative thread in that manuscript — just one more part of the story that, up to that point, had been left out.

Overall, through my poems in the manuscript (including this one), I’ve been looking to language for its potential to transform painful experiences — such as the experience of having been raised in poverty by a mentally ill parent — and, in the process of seeking meaning, hopefully come closer to finding something that lies beyond meaning.

I would add that at the time of writing this reflection on “What Was Left Out,” my manuscript is still in search of a publication home, but I feel hopeful that it will find one.

Jo-Ann Mort on “Sunday in Gdansk”:

Visiting Gdansk several years ago was a magical time for me, more due to the politics of what the city represents than to the quaint beauty found there. It is one of those cities whose very name evokes history–once the German city of Danzig until WW I, it is the landmass closest to the peninsula of Westerplatte where World War II began. It is, of course also the home of the transformational Solidarity Movement led by the shipyard union leader Lech Walesa, a resident of Gdansk, whose leadership and movement helped topple Soviet domination of Poland.
I was lucky enough to be in Gdansk during the 30th anniversary of the first free election since Solidarity started its revolution, which was celebrated in the city. It was eerie to see the famous and famed shipyards empty of ships and transformed into luxury loft living, next to an extraordinary museum that stands as a testament both to democracy and to the heroism of Solidarity. Top it all off with a faux pirate cruise boat that leaves from Gdansk to take day trips to the Westerplatte peninsula–with all of these colliding bits of history and symbolism, and the city as a metaphor for our age, how could a poem not emerge?

Ginny Threefoot on “Orchard Fruit: Grafting” and “Who Will Plant the Seeds of Svalbard”:

“Orchard Fruit: Grafting” began with the orchard scene from Kogonada’s After Yang, in which the title character explains the grafting process, a process by which a shoot from one plant is attached to the stock of another. Research led me to the work of artist Sam Van Aken, who makes public art comprised of grafted fruit trees. Van Aken’s tree sculptures, most notably his Tree of Forty Fruits, conserve native and heirloom species. They are the artist’s response to the creation of monocultures, to issues of food security and climate change. Van Aken’s trees underscore the dangers of agricultural practices that diminish diversity and alter ecosystems. Human endeavors to improve upon nature, and to profit from doing so, can have species-threatening results.

The creation of seed banks as a way to address these and other problems can lead to apocalyptic visions. The seed vault at Svalbard is actually called “the doomsday vault.” Located above the Arctic Circle, the facility is designed to protect the over 1.3 million seeds stored within, even in the event of the melting of the Arctic permafrost which is part of its security plan. It feels to me like stuffing cash under the mattress in anticipation of a total systems collapse. Should you survive, exactly what are you going to purchase with the paper crumpled in your pocket, and from whom? “Who Will Plant the Seeds of Svalbard” asks this question — who will plant these seeds, and in what environment? As I wrote the poem, I focused on the seeds themselves, these tiny representatives of the natural world, so threatened by our ingenuity and folly.

Cynthia Atkins on “Poem with a Ghost Town”:

Ever since I was very young, I understood that words performed a strange magic for me. I liked the sounds and cadences of words, phrases–and especially a phrase like ghost town—the words in themselves create such a vivid image. When most people think of ghost towns, they conjure up ideas of the Old West.  The reasons for abandonment of a town include natural disasters, extreme climates, war, dams, and pollution. Some ghost towns contain nearly intact human-built structures, while in others there are only a few traces—such as the foundations of buildings—of the people who once inhabited a thriving community.

When I began this poem, because of the toxic nature of my parents’ union, I remembered feeling abandoned and left, so a ghost town seemed an apt metaphor. I was a child in the back seat of a car, and my parents were arguing with such a high, violent pitch. It was blizzard-like Chicago weather, and everything felt beyond my control. My dad’s car swerved on the Dan Ryan Expressway.  A moment that was so potent with drama and adrenaline. Time slowed, and that billboard of the Doublemint twins flashed with those wide smiles, and lodged indelibly in my memory. Tools for writers, we realize how iconic images become symbolic and can hold such emotional complexity. Thinking of the afterlife of a town, a moment, a scene—how it’s all made by the remnants of a feeling.  Truly evocative to look at the lineage of a poem, the memories, images, line breaks, drafts—the way we arrive as if by train to an unknown destination—a ghost town.

Joan Houlihan on “Father” and “Analysand”:

I’ve been in my mind too long. Have you found yourself yet? my mother would ask during my hippie years. The answer is still, sadly, no. The problem is I don’t know if I’d recognize me if I found me. This ongoing search has resulted in a fascination with various forms of self-seeking. Freud and Jung, heroes in my high school and college years, were thrown aside for P.D. Ouspensky and Carlos Castenada, R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz and all their ilk, and now, 50 years on, I’ve found myself back to the early pull of psychoanalysis. Go figure. The poems here reflect my return. “Father” considers the connection between analyst, analysand, and the synchronicity of a hair. The title reflects the omnipresence of the singular Father as transference has its way. “Analysand” draws on a fumbling association backwards through the reality of visiting a dying mother to the lifelong lack of attachment to her. Mother is up over the roof as it were, and the narrator’s left with an empty bed, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a chronic absence of self.

Carol Muske-Dukes on “Pip”:

I wrote this poem focused on the rhyme, aware only of satisfying that choreography. When a friend or two read it, and referred to a “sonnet”, I had to laugh. That 14 line, 10 syllable per line drill is hard-wired in poet-consciousness –something I used to joke about with my students.  But here I hadn’t noticed that my sonnet was on auto-pilot.

This sonnet is obviously a sliver of invective  (its inspiration: late Roman, as in Catullus)  about the futility of good intentions.

The poem asks, how do good intentions survive this Pip character, whose own intentions are strategic, duplicitous and dick-derived, while faking otherwise?  The institution of misogyny is a hidden stronghold. And women who are outspoken don’t fare well at this institution, attempting to expose the scandal racket. They go up in flames, like witches way back. Meanwhile, Pip reveals his thoughts on “conscience” and lines up a harem.

Which is why the sonnet form, hammered into shape in auto-calibration: works for mockery. A hard right hook for  liars who make out, make off,  hustle onward – yet are caught in the end by their own fake machination.

Steven Bradbury on translating Hsia Yü:

I’ve been translating Hsia Yü more years than I can remember, but how she writes her poems and why they unfold as they do remains as amazing and mysterious to me as the murmuration of starlings—one can only wonder at the ethereal sweep and musicality of her words and phrases. Of one thing I’m certain, however: she is a voracious reader and adventurous browser. This fact came home to me the first time I visited her Taipei apartment—it was to hear her record one of her poems with the Beijing performance artist and noise musician Yan Jun. It was a tiny, one-room apartment, and as I squeezed among the score of other people who were there, I was astonished to find the walls were lined with bookshelves filled with hundreds and hundreds of books, each of which had been turned spine to the wall with its trimmed white paper edges facing outward, so you could not tell which book was which, as in some Borgesian Library of Babel. And as her voice and his music broke the silence, I felt like I was attending services in a chapel to the creative act.

Joseph Millar on this portfolio:

These poems were written at various times, from pre-covid days until now. Covid was a good time for me, writing-wise, and many of these came together then. We had a little group we called Monday Poetry, where many of us developed collections. For myself, I was relying more on music and repetition and less on narrative thread than usual, thinking of the poem as more of a song. It’s nice to see these together like this. I look back at them and see the rainfall, the train tracks, the dark sky and the cemetery. They are from a new collection called Shine, due out in October from Carnegie Mellon.

Author: Plume

Plume: Plume Issue #156 August 2024