Ron Smith on “Brasserie” and “An Annunciation of Blue”:
I think “Brasserie” is about friendship, about the heart-breaking fragility of our friends and our links to them. Rereading it now, I think that it’s also about our almost inevitably painful desire to feel at home in the world of our fragile friendships, a world full of our artifacts—our arts, in the broadest sense, which can never really provide the comfort we crave. Does Hemingway appear in this poem because of my horror at his betrayal of friendship in A Moveable Feast? Probably.
Like “Brasserie,” “An Annunciation of Blue” was written quickly (for me), each right after the actual event responded to in the poem (a lunch, a backyard fracas). “An Annunciation of Blue” allows me to revisit Signorelli’s beautiful and frightening tempera “Annunciation,” a painting that stunned me in Volterra many, many years ago. It also allows me to rethink what I see as an ongoing 21st century negotiation between an old-fashioned, stiff Darwinian model of the life sciences and a more flexible recent model—a model that seems to metabolize Wordsworthian and Emersonian truths about the natural world and our relation to it. I’m not alone in feeling that some scientists may have already achieved a fusion (or reconciliation) of what used to be utterly incompatible notions of subjectivity and objectivity, of mind and matter
Joseph Bathanti on “Ubi Sunt”:
In the autumn of 1971, freshly eighteen years old, I began my freshman year California State College, in the little Appalachian coal town of California, Pennsylvania on the Monongahela River, not far at all from the West Virginia state line, to its west and south, and less than fifty minutes away from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. I ended up at little California State quite by accident. I am first-generation-college and really had little in the way of counsel or direction, or discretion, in choosing a college, for which no one is to blame – and I would not change any of it.
I was also hellbent on continuing in college my path as an athlete – ultimately a kind of pipe dream, but a cherished one nonetheless. I had been a pretty good pole vaulter on my high school track team, so I walked on to the college team at California – not much of a feat at all – and for one season was a mediocre to poor pole vaulter at the college level. I practiced hard alone every day – there was no staff dedicated to coach pole vaulters – and traveled on dreary buses to dreary locker rooms at obscure little colleges in West Virginia and Pennsylvania and, though my passion never dwindled, I did not at all distinguish myself, other than to declare here and forever that I was on an intercollegiate athletic team for a lone season and that I reside, in crimson silks, somewhere in the vaults, of the official team photograph of the California State College Vulcans Track Team, 1972.
At the time I was also intoxicated with reading everything I could get my hands on; and the vague yearning to be a writer, nurtured in high school, had returned. My consciousness had rather imperceptibly shifted, yet I was the last to notice. In my Introduction to Literature class at California, we read Camus and Hemingway, Hawthorne, Thoreau. The teacher, Connie Mack Rea – grandson of baseball impresario and legend, Connie Mack; and also a former NBA basketball player – was a mysterious, cryptic fellow, with a wry mustachioed smile – and I was in his sway, though he doesn’t figure into the poem. One of our companion texts was called something like The Dictionary of Literary Terms – that still resides somewhere in my bookshelves as a curio rather than for any useful reason. I had seized on memorizing each term, one of which was ubi sunt – which, according to the Collins English Dictionary means “A poetic motif emphasizing the transitory nature of youth, life, and beauty …”; and the Poetry Foundation boils down to “Where are they?”
The poem itself digs into the wistful particulars of that track season, and the glory of that apprentice year at California. You never realize in the moment how closely you’re paying attention until, that is, you write a poem about it over a half century later. But I loved those madhouse Mon Valley kids I roomed and roamed with and all of our bonehead lethal shenanigans – many of which are showcased in the poem – that lone academic year in Appalachia and the mythos with which it fired my imagination for all time: the music, hubris, first blush encounters with literature and dreams of being a writer and, yes, “the transitory nature of youth, life, and beauty …” before one reckons how “transitory” it is indeed. But, back then, everything was in the offing – including a bum lottery number in the Vietnam draft (the war would end and I’d be delivered) – and I reveled living in the romance and possibility of liminality – as we all must habitually – though, at the time, I’d never heard of the word. It was the year I read A Clockwork Orange.
Charles Hartman on “Arcs” and “Oedipus Ux,” 20.viii.24:
Plume’s invitation to speak not only in but about poems poses challenges. How good is my memory? My filing system? How articulately can I re-inhabit the mind-space of composition? Of revision?
“Arcs,” a poem about our hunger for narrative and our trivial and profound knowledge of its workings, began in October 2022 while I was reading Carl Phillips’s wonderful Then the War (specifically “On Triumph,” says my note). For a couple of weeks I followed devious hints of syntax-plot, and the poem evolved though a dozen nonce subspecies. I’ve enjoyed retracing the twists, but I doubt they’d interest other readers.
As for “Oedipus Ux,” my earliest computer file, from September 2022, includes a headnote saying that all I had of the poem was a typescript dated January 12, 1991. Thirty-one years is some kind of record for me. As I transcribed it, I must have delved: my note calls that typed draft’s relation to contemporaneous journal entries “complicated”: “My feeling at the moment [says 2022] is that I understood things better in the poem” than in the journal. Rediscovering the poem this year, I was again taken aback. After deciding to share it, I made just a few drafts to sand off rough spots. I’m not sure that I wish I could reconstruct how or why I wrote the original.
Joshua McKinney on “Liebfraumilch,” “Scale,” and “Season”
These poems are English approximations of sijo (she-joe), a traditional Korean form that originated during the Goryeo dynasty (918-1392) and is still being written today. Syllabic in structure, the three lines of a sijo are broken into two hemistiches. There is a shift at the beginning of the third line similar to the volta of a sonnet. The basic form is as follows:
1st line 3 4 4 (or 3) 4
2nd line 3 4 4 (or 3) 4
3rd line 3 5 4 3
For those interested in the form, I recommend The Bamboo Grove: An Introduction to Sijo, edited and translated by Richard Rutt.
A few years ago, I found myself in a poetic doldrums. I had heard of the sijo, and the form intrigued me: brief yet formally strict enough to present a puzzle to be solved, a way of thinking more about rhythm than meaning. I wrote many poems in this form, along with my friend Tim Kahl, who subsequently published an entire book of them titled California Sijo. As the eclectic content of my three poems demonstrates, the sijo can accommodate a wide range of subject matter.
Some years ago, I read nearly every published word James Boswell wrote. The jumping-off point was the enigmatic epigraph to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, taken from the Life of Samuel Johnson: “This reminds me of the ludicrous account he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. ‘Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.’ And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said, ‘But Hodge shan’t be shot: no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.’” I was fascinated by the particularity of Boswell’s observations, by the cadences and vocabulary of eighteenth-century English, and by Boswell’s complicated humanity.
Reading Boswell led me to The Sheep and Wool Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1781–1820 and His Majesty’s Spanish Flock, by H. B. Carter. Those Spanish sheep—the first Merinos brought to England—spoke to me. Pugnacious, lustful, stubborn, stoic in their suffering—they, too, seemed to possess a complicated humanity, and they have made their way into a number of my stories, among them “The Afflictions at Kew” and “Ram No. 16 of His Majesty’s Spanish Flock.”
Though there are no sheep in “Traveling,” there is a broom-wielding cat. The two lines of dialogue at the end of that story are a riff on the questions posed by the sage Rabbi Hillel, from Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Ancestors).
Miriam Calleja on translating Nadia Mifsud’s poetry:
As though with a sleight of hand, Mifsud hones in on a poet’s superpower — that of observation. The three poems, written during the COVID-19 lockdown, contemplate moments in time that particularly, and perhaps disconcertedly, magnified us to ourselves. If we could spend more time observing, what did we notice, and how did we react? In my translation of Mifsud’s collection Variations of Silence, and in the poem “abracadabresque,” I try to recreate her skill at weaving melodic sounds into her lines, the turn of phrase at once surprising and precise. And then, the tenderness, silence, and intimacy: simultaneously private and universal.
There’s always space for silence, whether it engulfs or filters in. In +42, we see it in the lack of color, how it weighs on the speaker of the poem, “sadness strung like fairy lights / on my lashes.” The piece ends in playfulness, a suggested game that saves us from drowning in dread. Hope unfolds as a poem-long image in +57, a piece that stirs the senses and shakes silence with the twittering of birds. Time is slowed down and dark is replaced with light, silence with chaos, all ending on a peaceful note.
I enjoy translating Nadia Mifsud’s work because she is a poet preoccupied with detail and the intricacies of everyday life. We have the luxury of agonizing over the ‘right’ words together. She is a contemplative and careful writer whose lines help me be still and notice.
Milica Mijatović on “Ohio”:
Beware the Ides of March! comment by Tom Sleigh
I think of both of these poems as my mother’s poems, not mine: I was only the medium she spoke through. And because she speaks in the second poem from beyond the grave, it seems important to say that my mother took her own life at the age of 97.
Her whole life long, I was always quietly dazzled by her conversation, her vocabulary’s beautifully off-kilter mix between the faux-naif of “honey” and “darn”, or the saltiness of “pissant,” both of which come from her Dustbowl childhood in western Kansas, and her fifty-cent words like “pusillanimous” and “exsanguinate”, words she picked up when she was the first person in her tiny prairie town—male or female—to go to college. So how could I not want to capture her voice in a poem?
Over the last decade of her life, sometimes showing them to her, sometimes not, I wrote poems about her, sometimes in my voice, sometimes in hers as in “Phone Call,” or as a kind of call and response, almost a duet. Every time I wrote one, I thought it would be the last. But I had the ridiculous notion that as long as I was writing about her, or intending to, she wouldn’t die. Now that she’s dead—a fact I refuse to believe—I’ve dedicated poems that I wrote before she died to her 98th, 99th, and 100th birthdays. What hopeful hopelessness. But if poems don’t bring people back to life, literally, at least for the time it takes to read them, what good are they?
“Phone Call: Lesson in Style” is a loose transcription of her conversation when her Parkinson’s was far advanced. There were times when her neurological damage caused her to make connections that were preternaturally eloquent as well as deeply strange. All I did was listen to her and type as she talked, after which I cleaned up (some) of the repetitions and discovered that tercets brought out the subtle shifts in her intonations—from bewilderment, to a kind of dark humor about suicide, to a detached bemusement with the more and more wayward operations of her own brain. When her voice took over mine, I felt an uncanny closeness to her, a closeness that I never felt in even our most intimate conversations.
And as I said earlier, in “The Story of Civilization” she speaks from beyond the grave. She discovered classical literature when she went to college and loved it her whole life long. In her final two years, she went blind from macular degeneration and lost one of the few solaces she had left: reading. But her friends stepped up and took turns reading to her. In fact, the night before she took her own life, she asked me to read from one of her favorite books, The Story of Civilization, by Will and Ariel Durant.
Starting with prehistory and moving forward, she spent the last year of her life listening to that multi-volume march through history. Her life ran its course simultaneously with Julius Caesar’s: the last section we completed chronicled the assassination of Julius Caesar and the fall of the Roman Republic. As I read, my mother kept smiling a little smile, deeply attuned to the irony of Caesar being struck down by his friends, and how tomorrow morning, I and others would gather round her and help her do “the deed,” as she took to calling it. “Beware the Ides of March, Tom!” she called out to me when I reached the end of the chapter—just like the soothsayer calls out to Caesar a few moments before the conspirators strike.
Six months later, her voice came to me and decreed that her words had to be written as a strophic ode. The turn and counterturn aren’t strictly observed, but you could say that the preamble and the final section are the equivalents.
In the poem she dies as she lived—always getting the last word.
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