Bolz, Jacob, Rosen Kindred, et. al.

Jody Bolz on “Eclipse” for The Poets and Translators Speak

I once wrote a poem that began “This moon isn’t like some other thing….” Having read the world symbolically since childhood, I wanted to insist that the “real” moon was enough.

In 2022, a few months after my husband’s death, I witnessed a total lunar eclipse and found it impossible to separate what I saw from what it seemed to mean.  In “Eclipse,” two timelines merge as a shadow covers the moon–a disappearance that’s both illusory and profound.

Jules Jacob on “Sky Grief”:

My first draft of “Sky Grief,” dated September 2023, was a two-part poem about the Sonoran Desert, bats, and a four-hundred-year-old stone splitting cherry tree. After multiple revisions, I sent the poem to a trusted mentor who suggested I separate the sections into two poems. After I recalled an unusual encounter I’d had with a bat when I was young, I split the sections and wove the memory into the first part of the original poem. (The stone splitting cherry tree stayed in Japan with the original title.)

“Sky Grief” lives in my in progress fourth collection which explores resilience and truths’ conundrums and myths as they relate to sociological and ecological changes in our current landscapes. When we mourn the loss of dark skies and our ability to view the Milky Way, are we sad because we’ve “lost stars” or because we recognize we’re responsible for our inability to see them? And what will my younger daughters, ages eleven and fourteen, who aren’t particularly sad about not viewing constellations they’ve never seen, mourn at my age?

Sally Rosen Kindred on “Anatomy of Late”:

This is the first poem in a series I’ve been writing of “Anatomy of” poems. At first I wanted to embody different words: to sound out their possible bones and skin, picture their hungers and sleeps. I chose words that mattered to me in a primal way, words that carry portentous histories, emotional intensities, and layers of narrative experience. I was thinking as I wrote about the way a word, when you say it, conjures–and really, comes to mean–the ghosts of all the times it’s saved or hurt you, especially when it’s told you who you are or what the world is.

It was important to me, too, that the poem’s voice (this word’s speaker) be manifestly shaped by late. I wanted the rhythm and the line to follow contours of the speaker’s relationship to the word. I had to think of the word as a body, a being, but I also had to think of the word as a spell. Ultimately, late became a place and time, funneled down to a moment, and in that moment, a way of breathing.

Rebecca Seiferle on “Laboring to Explain”:

“Laboring to Explain,” is part of a manuscript in progress that is driven by an ecological concern, though I could more accurately call it an extinction concern – what will survive, and how, in a world radically altered. I don’t think we understand what extinction means. In my reading in various fields, I looked toward some kind of clarity that science might allow, and I came across the work of E.O. Wilson. If you google him, what comes up is his being dubbed “the father of biodiversity,” given his Theory of Island Biogeography, as well as the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. Yet, his work involved the practices evoked in this poem, essentially exterminating a mangrove island, so he could then measure the rate of repopulation. I don’t understand this kind of cold labor. How does this kind of creature exist, that, in the service of “the natural world,” or “equilibrium” scours the earth, even one small part of it, of life? I couldn’t add any layer of understanding to it; it seemed that recording Wilson with a kind of poetic cold eye would be indictment enough, as he reveals his own apocalypse.

Bruce Bond on “Purge”:

When I first wrote this poem, based on the little-known painting by Hitler entitled Madonna and Child, I knew that I would have to explore more than the obvious ironies.   I wanted to engage the consequences of “purity” (as a divine and so incontrovertible absolute) as an ideal resonant with not only Naziism but also the psychology of shame, narcissism, and transference.   A fundamental self-hatred implicit in the notion of the pure serves as complement to the abject, the “animal” projected onto others, those so-called “undesirables” scheduled for elimination.  The material object became a focal point for going more deeply into the connection between shame and a manic inflation so extreme it leads to insomnia, hegemony, and a break with the real.  When I say the “workers never sleep,” I am thinking not only of Hitler’s psyche but so too those of his many soldiers who stayed up nights on amphetamines while defending his vision.  At the end of the poem, the notion of “providence” recalls Hitler’s many allusions to “Vorsehung”, deluded with the sense of calling and charismatic hubris that would lead to his eventual downfall.   When I wrote the poem, I put it away, unsure if it would resonate as contemporary.  Now, many years later, it feels, to me at least, more contemporary than ever.

Lexi Pelle on “Mass on the Beach”:

Most of the early drafts of this poem were in couplets, a form I use in a lot of poems with spiritual and religious themes to capture the relationship between the internal and external experience. Putting this poem into a single stanza gave the poem a much more intimate and snapshot-like feel.
Most of the content of this poem existed in the first draft, so many of the edits were related to the wording of that content. I struggled a lot with the description of the volleyball tournament excitement. Some of the options I tried were: flailing their arms, waving their arms, pumping their fists, arms raised, pinwheeling their arms, whooping cheers, excited cheers. “Jumping cheers” felt like the most accurate description and the one that was the least distracting. I wanted the reader to focus more on the images that surrounded the tournament, the bikini-clad women and the kid with her kite and I felt this simple image bolstered those ones.
I also struggled with the opening, I knew I wanted to write a poem titled, “Mass on the Beach” but didn’t know where to begin. I toyed with adding a line about my dad asking/slightly forcing me to take my Nana to the beach mass, but decided I didn’t want this speaker’s ambivalence about being there to be so plainly stated, especially not in the beginning of the poem. I think the opening feels more playful and intimate without that set-up.
In my opinion the most important edit I made was to the final line. I played around a lot with the definite and indefinite articles. I tried: “a kite / some kid can’t get the wind to catch.” and “a kite / a kid can’t get the wind to catch.” before landing on “the kite a kid”. Thematically, I liked the implication of the indefinite article struggling to control the definite article. I had no idea that image was going to be the final image or even why that image was important until I arrived at it. I had mentally gathered many things I had seen the last time I took my Nana to the beach and that image was just one of the many that colored the experience. I didn’t think of it as particularly significant. In an effort to capture the exact experience of being there for the reader I stumbled on an image that spoke to the wider themes of the poem. If I had to guess the length of this poem prior to actually writing it I probably would have guessed it would be about double this length, but once I wrote down the image of the kite I knew the poem had said what it needed to say.

Henry Israeli on translating the poems by Gentian Çoçoli:

Both poems ‘happened’ within the perimeter of the house and garden. Both are connected to my earliest memories of my grandfather and father, the house, walks in the garden, perceptions of nature, etc. It was amazing for a child to see my grandfather take out of the pockets of his black coat some green shoots of lemons or tangerines that would be grafted onto the orange trees, or when they were covered with straw so that the snow wouldn’t damage them. Or to see the beehives, father extracting honey, bees lined up in a mysterious order in the hexagonal hives, or when the bees got sick and burned inside those magical boxes.

These early images of my life would perhaps not have taken on any meaning or perhaps would not have managed to be written in poetry, if I had not experienced the great social unrest that engulfed Albania in the dark year of 1997. ‘Trapped’ at home, without moving for weeks, I was reading about Mandelstam’s life in Voronezh and his habit of shaking cigarette ashes off his shoulder. Suddenly I saw myself how the roof of our house, huge, heavy, covered with gray stone tiles, seemed to shake its ashes over me and thus the images of childhood suddenly took on their meanings, and images from every corner of the house were appearing to me quite clearly. Apparently, as Li Po wrote in one of his letters to the emperor – also a poet – I was at the right distance from these memories to see them clearly and perhaps to write them down.

Author: Plume

Plume: Plume Issue #160 December 2024