Wenthe, Thorburn, Rhone Fancher, et. al.

William Wenthe on “Fairy Tale”:

This poem is part of a recently completed book manuscript, titled Auspices, which refers to an ancient practice of divining the future by the observation of birds.  In the book, I’m seeking legitimate grounds for happiness, in the face of the dire portents for the earth, and for ourselves, that we must live with. “Fairy Tale” is situated in a transitional, middle section of the book.  I wrote this poem out of events pretty much as described—external events and my internal responses.  Though the poem doesn’t (and needn’t) mention this, it is shaded by a book of French fairy tales I found in our house when I was 8 or 9 years old. They utterly horrified and fascinated me, exposing me to a range of fears that I see now were adult beyond my years.  Growing into adulthood I came to learn these fears directly. And so, to invert the cliche, the fears are fairy tales come true.

 

 

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.

 

 

Charlie Clark on “Car Trouble”:

This poem, “Car Trouble,” does a pretty straightforward job of laying its occasion bare. I saw a car engine smoking and, by virtue of the powers of association, my old art teacher came to mind.

Beneath that, I think, are my early educational proclivities—both my own (questionable) aesthetic interests and the way certain notions of art, in my youth, still prioritized a more acutely socially oppositional stance. Let’s wallow in the corruptible. My teacher (Mr. P.) saw/encouraged in me a willingness to blur excitement with provocation, to explore the idea that what is arresting need not necessarily be what is polite or altogether good; that there is value in the trouble of a flame because the flame is destructive. Call it the Dionysian mode. Maybe I’ve learned better since. Maybe I was only hearing what I wanted to hear. Maybe, seeing this, my old teacher would sigh and shake his head. (He did, after all paint Eastern Orthodox altars as a side hustle.) But then these ideas were thrilling.

The next turn of the screw is that, although this teacher was immensely important to my early education (my only AP credits were in studio art), he had a long and complex last name, so he went by Mr. P. I can say his whole name aloud, but I have no idea how to render it in text. That limitation/imperfection is both interesting and bothersome. I like the idea that one can lose something that important. But I’d also really like to remember how to spell his name. I’ve researched county records online and even called the county public school offices to see whether anyone could help me find out how to spell his name, but all of those searches depend on knowing the spelling of a person’s name. So the research resembled the experience, also now lost, of going into a video store and asking the person at the counter whether they have a copy of that movie starring that guy who said that thing.

The poem is sentimental in that its occasion is memory, but it also presses against the limits of memory, trying to see where things disappear, and to embrace the remnants that remain.

 

 

David Dominguez on his three 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.

 

 

Christopher Bakken on “For the Dead Union”

I had the initial idea for this poem many years ago, when one of my students submitted an essay in which they mistakenly referred to the title of Robert Lowell’s famous poem as “For the Dead Union.” This was 2017, only months after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, and during Donald Trump’s first year in office, so the error seemed prescient.

Lowell composed “For the Union Dead” in 1960, with the disturbances of that moment in U.S. history challenging his imagination. I began composing my response to Lowell’s poem in 2021, in the wake of the COVID pandemic and the Trump presidency, while trying to account for the disturbing changes I’d been seeing where I live in western Pennsylvania—foremost among them an alarming resurgence of violent white nationalism.

As I worked to fathom such backwardness, I looked to the complicated history of Meadville, Pennsylvania: a place originally settled on the frontier (George Washington began his military career in the area), with a history of education and activism (Allegheny College was founded here in 1815 and the abolitionist John Brown once resided nearby—thus the town was a stop on the Underground Railroad), as well as union labor and manufacturing (the zipper was first patented in Meadville and the city boasted a proud and profitable legacy of technical machine work). Alongside this progressive past, which had been upended by decades of economic decline, a tradition of hate: the KKK had been present in the area for generations, and right-wing militias had recruited quietly, but such groups had suddenly become emboldened. I was not surprised to learn that Meadville residents took part in the insurrection of January 6^th, 2021.

While writing “For the Dead Union,” I could not have foreseen that the poem would find its way to publication now, just days before an election that might return Trump to power.

My poem borrows its epigraph and echoes several other phrases from Lowell’s “For the Union Dead.” It might be helpful for readers to know that there is only one look-alike to the delicious and desirable chanterelle mushroom: foragers must be careful not to consume the orange and bioluminescent Jack-o’lantern mushroom, which is highly toxic. Information about the Newton Observatory at Allegheny College was gathered from the Library of Congress’ Historical American Buildings Survey. The phrase, “In the woods we return to reason and faith” is from Emerson’s essay “Nature.”

 

 

Jill Rosser on her two poems:

On “Hungarian Lesson”:

“Alsof er een engeltje over je tong piest.” If a Swedish person says this in response to your question, “How did you like the pumpkin soup?” it means your culinary skills are fabulous. The Swedish translates “As if an angel were to piss on your tongue.” Personally, I would skip that particular hors d’oeuvre at heaven’s gate. Come to think of it, that would be more of an amuse-bouche, another term we don’t have in English, since compared to the French we are food simpletons. I mean if you ask them. Still, there’s a reason half our cooking terminology originates from the French. And while there must be a reason why the Japanese have 50 very different nouns for 50 different kinds of rain and we don’t, I haven’t yet figured it out.

“Hungarian Lesson” was inspired by my insanely prolonged study of that language, which has no linguistic siblings. Don’t get me started on its maddening difficulties, but suffice it to say that if you learn to be completely fluent in Hungarian they will make you a Hungarian citizen. (One of the few languages Rosetta Stone won’t teach.)

When I learned this idiom, it struck me as astonishing that another culture would equate the notion of familiarity with the same body part we focus on, but choose a different side of it. Why do we say “I know it like the back of my hand?” The palm is so much more intimate. When I’m trying to make friends with a toddler, I often compliment their shoes. What part of themselves do they see most often? They naturally view their shoes as an intimate symbol of their identity. There are so many references to the heart in poetry, as the most integral human feature; seems to me the palm is more so, hands down.

It is also true that hello is the word for an informal goodbye in Hungarian. Which makes it really fun as an American to sing lines from the Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye” when leaving a party in Budapest. I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello —

On “Snow Rapture”:

I think the only thing more beautifully mesmerizing to watch than flames in a fireplace is falling snow. On the other hand, it’s so sneaky, the way this friendly spectacle of snow, feather-light, magically lit up at night, wafting playfully in an updraft; how could it possibly accumulate to six-foot drifts, and treacherous roads, and Buffalo-level lockdowns? Like those troubling thoughts that we have resolved, those situations we’ve handled, those bad dreams we’ve awakened from. . .