Matthew Thorburn on “Waiting for Someone”
To be honest, I’d always been a fairly casual Edward Hopper fan. I knew Nighthawks and a few other paintings, but in 2022 when I went to see Edward Hopper’s New York, an exhibit at the Whitney Museum, I didn’t know that he’d lived in the city for most of his life. The majority of his paintings I saw that day were new to me too. But as I walked around the galleries, I was hooked. I often write in response to paintings, and felt that I wanted to do that here. I wrote several other “Hopper poems” before turning to his Self-Portrait, which intrigued me in part because this spare figure in a spare setting seemed to offer so little to write about.
I thought about the painting for several months, finally deciding that what interests me about it is what’s not there. Hopper depicts himself with no tools of the trade in sight, and he’s not in his studio—he’s really not anywhere in particular. This image of him as a non-descript everyman made me think of someone who puts all the interesting stuff into their work, so that seeing them you’d never think they were intensely creative—or creative at all. I also thought about the painting’s setting—one of those bare, empty, interior spaces Hopper must have loved—and how often his work seems to be about space and light, how absence can be a kind of presence, how emptiness can take up so much room. In this way, the painting makes me think of Philip Larkin’s poem, “High Windows”: “The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”
Alexis Rhone Fancher on “When My Son Is Dead 16 Years”:
“When My Son Is Dead 16 Years” is the latest in a series of poems I’ve written each year, on or around my son’s death day, September 14th, 2007. My only child, Joshua was 26 years old, a strapping young man, smart, athletic, unfailingly kind. Did I mention handsome? Girls flocked toward him like hummers around a feeder. “When My Son Is Dead 14 Years” was published by Plume in 2022. Each September I lie to myself, proclaim I’m through mourning, that I’ve said all that needs to be said. Instead, I fall back into the grief and devastation that has never left me. Then I write the poem.
Lindsay Stuart Hill on “The Bahá’í School”:
I had my first direct encounters with organized religion at the Unitarian Universalist church that my family attended when I was a child. These experiences felt playful and exploratory: in Sunday school we wrote our own epitaphs and even designed our own cults! We also visited an array of churches, temples, and synagogues. Our trip to a Bahá’í learning center stuck with me for decades, lingering as if from another life. When I wrote this poem, I was reading W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and had fallen in love with his simple yet lush language. The focus of my poem is totally different, of course, but I wanted to evoke the almost devotional clarity of memory that comes across in that book.
Mary Mackey On “White Gauze Curtains”:
I was lying in narrow bed in a hotel room on top of a high hill in Mexico watching the white gauze curtains flutter in the breeze, when the idea for “White Gauze Curtains” came to me; not in words but from a kind of wordless space where words do not exist and everything is a unified whole and at the same time completely individualized. The curtains seemed for a moment to be ephemeral, animated, as if they were reaching out to me and then drawing back like people trying to get my attention, failing, and trying again. As I watched them advance and retreat in the wind, I found myself wondering that, if there were an afterlife (and this is a big if), this is what the people we have loved might do after death—struggle to communicate with us, approach us, touch us, try to talk to us, even tell us one last time that they loved us; and failing to reach us, try again.
David Dominguez on his poems:
Thanks to Danny Lawless for publishing side-by-side these three poems. Each poem focuses on a written work that has had profound influence on my writing: Longinus’s On the Sublime, Faulkner’s Nobel prize acceptance speech, and Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Plenty of other voices are singing as well, such as Lorca’s “Play and Theory on the Duende” and Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. I had wanted to write these poems for years but didn’t quite know how. The ideas rattled around in my brain until I finally decided to put them down as prose during freewriting exercises. For each poem I used a fountain pen and a favorite notebook, and once I gave myself permission to just let the ideas flow onto the page without regard for neatness, craft, syntax, grammar, or mechanics the poems began to emerge. Then, I took a pruning knife and honed the lines, line breaks, and images on paper. Finally, I took the poems to the computer. I must have drafted each poem a hundred times. In addition, I shared them with my pal the poet Christopher Buckley, who gave me immeasurable feedback. Still, I’m tempted to sharpen the pruning knife. In many ways, I wrote these three poems for my students. I wanted to inspire them. I wanted to show them that reading and writing has the power to change one’s life.