Olsen, Bamber, Peseroff, et. al.

William Olsen on his poems:

These poems began before I started writing them.  My 97-year-old father was dying of vascular dementia, which wanted to have him all to itself.  This went on for two years.  I scribbled notes at night before bed, to help get by.  Some notes took verse form.   These carried the same valence as other entries. When I did go back to the notes they took a long time to process.  Making these poems was a way of practicing painstaking care, and extending care into an internal realm.  Beyond the driving force of honesty there’s maybe a longing to approach something like the enigma of mortality, without being swallowed up by it.  My father’s ordeal wasn’t going to go unnoted!  I went for his voice, his presence.   As thoroughly as his health declined, some part of him remained untouched: he was still the same person.  I’d find myself staring at his face just to see something concrete and alive.  Occasionally we found ourselves both trying to find him a right-enough word.  This cognitive overlapping transgressed the boundaries of silence at its most ungiving. Language became elemental and mutual and took on urgency. The immediacies of the notes and their surprising ease continued in the poems.  I may have shed a few aesthetic decisions.  I stopped trying to commandeer technique, or seeing form as a remedy.  Despair was never enough, nor was redemption the point; life was.  An undergone fidelity.  The poems did at times swerve towards the far flung, but they never strayed far from the pressures from which they sprang.

Linda Bamber on “Poems from My Deathbed (and Just Beyond)”:

Thinking about death is unpopular in our culture, but in the Zen tradition doing so is thought to promote well-being.  Death being an inevitable reality, it can stand for all the forms of reality we resist, depleting and confining ourselves as we do.  Coming to terms with death, on the other hand, leads to a more spacious life.  At the time I wrote “Poems from My Deathbed” I was in fact reading Larry Rosenberg’s Living in the Light of Death and a volume of Japanese death poems; but I never intended to respond to all that.   I was instead resisting another unpleasant reality, which was that I had no idea how to go on with the project I was officially engaged in, and these poems were an alternative to doing so.  Some might call it procrastination.  When they stopped coming, it occurred to me that they might be sequenced into a whole; but how?  Chronologically, tonally, in terms of diction, perspective and mood, they were all over the map.  Finally I decided that if I began in dread and disbelief and ended in matter-of-factness, I needn’t be too particular about how I got from one place to the other.  Now I’m glad of the incongruities among the poems as they seem to reflect the incongruities of psychic life itself.  It’s not always harmonious in there!  Presumably that’s what Marvin Minsky meant when he coined the phrase, “the society of mind.”

And heart, I might add.

Joyce Peseroff on her two poems:

I don’t usually write ekphrastic poems, but both “A Fear Grows in My Heart” and “Art” arose from the work of others. The first is a very loose imitation of a translation from the Yiddish by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samual Solomon of Celia Dropkin’s “A Fear Growing in My Heart,” which I discovered when it appeared in Poetry Daily. I immediately shared the poet’s apprehension of death’s nose-wrinkling presence, and how a series of objects may become infused with uncanny permanence. I was also encouraged by my friend Steven Cramer’s Departures from Rilke to imagine new ways to nod to a text while fashioning one of my own.

“Art” began with a visit to Gloucester with another friend, Teresa Cader, to view the exhibit “Edward Hopper in Cape Anne.” The show included a handful of Josephine Hopper’s paintings as well, defining who was who in that power couple. The artists were both young when they settled in Gloucester; I considered the writers and artists I met while a Junior Fellow at the University of Michigan fifty years ago––the drive we shared, powered by our youth. Later I searched Facebook and found those––whose names I could remember––still making art. The hope that our work will outlast us contends with the afterlife of Dropkin’s eerie, posthumous silks.

Karen Paul Holmes on “Apology to My Husband’s Snore”:

Let me start with an apology to my dear husband, who will see this poem out in the world and share it on his Facebook page (he’s my biggest fan), while being perfectly okay that it is not a flattering picture of him. And the poem is true. Well, mostly.

It seemed appropriate to grossly exaggerate the snore and its many variations. My goal was to amplify (no pun intended) my frustration using humor—I had such fun coming up with metaphors, similes, and words with interesting sound themselves. Since I have a Masters in musicology, I naturally turn to using musical instruments or terms, but for this poem, I also wanted to include sounds of many kinds.

When my critique group saw an early version, someone suggested I could sleep in the guest room, and that sparked my idea for the ending. The thought of going into that other cold, lonely room is horrific. I’d rather suffer in my own bed with my love next to me… though I love to complain about it too. But guess what? I just started “Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Insomnia,” which is now the number one “cure,” and it’s already helping me sleep so deeply that I often don’t hear the snore and wonder if it’s still happening.

Christopher Buckley on “After Ungaretti”:

As advertised in the title, the virtues of my poem are in no small part in debt to the influences of the great Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, a poet my great friend, poet, and mentor Peter Everwine encouraged me to read—along with Leopardi, Salvatore Quasimodo, Montale, and Pavese—long ago.  I’d been rereading Ungaretti and Pavese especially hoping to dovetail any inspiration I found with the more popular culture touchstones of my youth growing up in Santa Barbara, and which were becoming the bedrock of my new book SPREZZATURA, out soon from Lynx House Press.  I benefited by Ungaretti’s concision of imagery and phrasing as well was his secular metaphysical take on experience, which I tired to adapt to my ornery view of things these days, my mixed doubt and hope.

Rae Armantrout on “WHY THE SPHINX LIKED RIDDLES” and “EPISODIC”:

“WHY THE SPHINX LIKED RIDDLES”

People often ask me about titles. The title is usually the last thing I write and that was the case here. Each of the three sections was written separately—on different days. The first and third sections are about me—which means that, out of shyness, I guess, I’m using third person instead of first. These are the thoughts and feelings of an older woman who doesn’t feel like she quite coincides with herself, perhaps because she’s stretched out over a lifetime. The second section is a more general commentary on babies and old people. The third part is based on a dream. In the dream, I’m/she’s doing something you wouldn’t associate with an old lady—or with me at all—riding a motorcycle. It kind of sounds like she’s riding into a black hole. After I put the three parts together, I saw that the poem could have an implicit connection to the Sphinx’s riddle which asks us to imagine the three stages of life all at once. (I guess the
“goes on two legs” part  of the riddle is more like goes on two wheels here.)

“EPISODIC”

“Episodic” happened when I watched an episode of the TV horror series “From.” I kind of started in the middle of the first season after my husband got into it. The poem’s a capsule summary of the plot as I grasped it. I like to do capsule summaries of things in popular culture sometimes—just see if I can boil them down to the basics. What struck me with this is that, if you eliminate the bus and the phrase “fully grown,” everything here describes ordinary life as we know it. My compliments to the screen writers.

Susan Ayres on translating Elsa Cross’ “Jerez:

Elsa Cross is one of Mexico’s most important writers today, with over thirty books of poetry, many translations, as well as scholarly books on the philosophy of religion. I first met Elsa in 2017 when I visited Cuernavaca. She had given me permission to translate some of her poems, and we sat together at a table piled high with papers and dictionaries as we read over my translations of a chapbook of haiku sequences. Elsa promised I would learn a lot about poetry as a translator. I am still learning. “Jerez,” the poem published in Plume, is part of a multi-part poem, “The Embrace/El abrazo,” published in Elsa’s volume, Nadir (2010). The elegiac poems in Nadir allude to Paul Celan and George Seferis, to mythology and metaphysics. Her poem “Jerez” honors Ramón López Velarde (1888-1921), one of the greatest Mexican poets of the twentieth century. The poem describes a bronze sculpture of his hand, that stands on a piano in his house at Jerez, in the state of Zacatecas. One of the difficulties in translating the poem was finding the best connotation for the last line. I tried many possibilities for “con su larga querella,” and finally settled on what might have been common usage in López Velarde’s time—“with a lingering plaint.”

Andrei Burago on his translation in this month’s feature:

“The two poems I translated, by Alla Bossart and Igor Irteniev, reflect on loss and legacy. Bossart’s poem channels the voice of a grieving mother fighting to reclaim her son’s body after his death, intertwining raw anguish with biblical themes to critique the inhumanity of oppression. Irteniev’s poem portrays Navalny as a singular figure whose influence endures beyond his death. The translations seek to preserve the urgency and emotional depth of these works.”

Elena Karina Byrne on her poems:

Author: Plume

Plume: Plume Issue #161 January 2025