Plume

Jody Stewart on   “While Kicking Her Heels” and “A Given”:

something about the decorum and half-hidden secrets of a waiting room,  an only child and lone, discarded bear both in transit,  add that poignant, perhaps envious glance onto a family’s evening window —  all hold a similar weight for me. Such feelings shift, travel, then often return. The writing just happens, gets fiddled with. If I tried to this figure out, I would babble in circles. Best not to. . . .

 

 

Christopher Buckley on “Sprezzatura“:

Sprezzatura: a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art; a form of defensive irony. . .

I grabbed on to this charged Italian term as it fit the voice of much of my recent work. A number of the poems in the new book by this title, just out from Lynx House Press, were inspired by Italian subjects and poets—Pavese, Ungaretti, Montale, Leopardi, the lushness of the language itself.  However, it’s mainly the attitude, the take on experience, the mix of cynicism and hope and/or the loss of hope that informs the poems.  At its heart, it’s book of elegies for lost friends, many poets from Fresno, the years I lived there—the luminous past that can still
sing a bit to me, the difficulty of the future we all face.

 

 

Sadaf Halai on “Sestina for an Idiom”:

“Sestina for an Idiom” was a difficult poem to write. One difficulty was the sestina’s poetic form. Another was “translating” a common Urdu proverb, one I’ve heard so many times I couldn’t tell you exactly what it means. It is an idiom usually delivered with exasperation. It poorly translates to “hair isn’t whitened in the sun.” It implies that the physical signs of aging are proof of knowledge gained with time and trouble. Wisdom isn’t attained by doing nothing, by sitting in the sun, by letting the sun bleach one’s hair. Like many idioms, its logic is clumsy. Translating it made it clumsier. But most difficult was dredging up the past, of saying it like it is—or as it was—without sentimentality. Of thinking of art, in the words of Philip Larkin, “as always the statement of the simple fact.”

 

 

Adam Chiles on “Ten Days after the Dobbs Decision”:

The events of this poem unfolded that day in real time. We’d invited friends and family over for the 4^th of July holiday and while we did not discuss the Dobbs decision in detail it was clearly at the forefront of everyone’s minds. A fundamental, democratic right had been struck down and we were all still trying to come to terms with the news and the impact this decision would have on our lives. The possum appeared to us exactly as described in the poem and I’ll let the events of the poem, the mother possum, speak for itself. A few weeks later, I sat down and wrote in one sitting on my phone a draft of the poem. It came out almost exactly as you see it now. The vulnerability and suffering of the possum, its young exposed and writhing in front of us that day, was a terrible sight, and I suppose when writing and revising the poem, recounting the tragic circumstances of this animal, she began to speak, more broadly, to the vulnerability of a woman’s body and what terrible suffering would come from this Supreme Court decision.  My wife managed to contact a wildlife person that day, who came and took the possum, her babies into care. A few days later she called the office and was told the possum and her young did not survive.

 

 

Sawnie Morris on her poems:

When my husband received a glioblastoma diagnosis, we entered an incomprehensible reality. In the months prior to and during that week, I experienced a series of dreams, both terrifying and comforting. The dream experiences continue and are the radioactive materials with which I work and my benevolent muses. IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS LIFE was the result of a hypnogogic experience at the time of a recurrence. YOU AND S/HE ARE BREAKING UP resulted from a dream that occurred shortly before I learned that my “ex,” would be dead of a different kind of cancer within two weeks. It was hard to tell whose death was being addressed. I think now it was hers, but ultimately it was and is his––  and mine –– and anyone’s. We all knew and loved one another in historical time, but as an upstart translation of Hafiz declares, “Love kicks the ass of Time and Mortality.”

 

 

Rachel Neve-Midbar on her translations of Abba Kovner:

While on tour in the USA in 1972 Abba Kovner told his audience: “When I write I am like a man praying.” Yet, he said, in the liturgy, “a man should not say his own prayer before the prayer of his community…But the community in which I..say my poems is half alive and half dead. Who are living and who are dead? I don’t know how to answer this question. But I believe there is one place in the world without cemeteries. This is the place of poetry.”

In every way, from how the poems sit on the page to imagery and syntax, Kovner’s poems reveal the tension of both losing and being lost. Like many Holocaust poets Kovner’s poetics born in the broken language of trauma: in a poetry of unrevealed codes, repeated metaphors and a personal thesaurus aimed at both concealing and revealing a torn soul.

Finding the way to express this tension in a poem in English is the challenge of translation.

Questions of how to reveal this tension came about in my translation of the poem “Only,” which is the last poem in Kovner’s book-length sequence My Little Sister. A pressure is created between the formal and informal language within this short poem. The very heavy, formal twisting image of a ship’s prow in an icy storm is sandwiched between strangely informal word choices. Kovner chose the Hebrew word “mita” (bed) to depict what I translated as “coffin” and “resting place.” In ancient Rome, in very rare cases the word “bed” was used as the word for something used to carry the dead to burial. However, Hebrew has other words for “grave” and for the places where one would bring the dead; “bed” is not amongst them. A bed is a place of comfort, of coziness. It’s a strange word choice. As is the word he chose for “mother,” repeated twice (as is the word “mita”) in the poem. The word Kovner chose is “Imi” which is a shortened and colloquial way of saying “my mother,” usually “Ima sheli.” “Imi,” not used in texts, is the comfortable, cozy and intimate way that a child would call to his mother. I therefore made the choice in my translation to end the poem with the word I would use if I, as a child called to my own mother in the middle of a dark night, “Mommy. Mommy”

 

 

T. R. Hummer on “Godscan”:

“Godscan”  is an outlier for me, distinctly unlike most of my other work. I confess I don’t remember exactly how or when the idea for it arrived, but I do know that the finished poem comes from reading I was and am doing—Walter Benjamin, Gershom Sholem, and Wittgenstein on the one hand, and Oliver Sacks’s wonderful neurology-focused work on the other. Also in the mix was a series of PET scans my wife has been getting for the past few years.

The poem, then, is an outlier in terms of its subject matter, but does arise out of a tendency I have to literalize ideas and figures of speech (see “First Assembly of God” in my book Walt Whitman in Hell; for that matter, see the poem “Walt Whitman in Hell”). So: God is within you; “I is an other,”etc., here appearing in utterly concrete manifestations. Maybe.

Along the way, I became anxious about pronouns, and so eschewed them whenever possible; the result is that nobody in the poem is gendered, especially not the anomaly who might be God. Or perhaps not. This strikes me as a constructive ambiguity, or so I hope.

The poem is in terza rima partly because, even though I usually write so-called “free verse” (don’t get me started on the silliness of certain terms), I have deeply internalized some aspects of traditionally formal poetry. I seem to remember writing the first five or six lines and thinking, Hmm, I’ll bet this could be terza rima. And then it was.

 

 

Steven Ratiner on his three poems:

My three poems in this issue come from a soon-to-be published collection Grief’s Apostrophe (Beltway Editions.)  I think of this as a book in three movements: it begins with personal loss (though often woven into my own stories is the grieving experienced by family and friends, forming a kind of encompassing first-person testimony.)  Then the book broadens out to explore societal grief––the cultural and political torments we hold in common.  But finally, it concludes with a section that depicts a variety of circumstances where we attempt to process our enduring pain and turn it into…well, something else.  Healing is too easy a term for what takes place––but it does feel as if some sort of new life is slowly emerging from the old.  I think of the sculpture “Apollo and Daphne” by the Baroque master Gian Lorenzo Bernini.  He captures the nymph at the very moment her father’s magic is transforming her into a laurel tree in order to escape the god’s advances.  She is crying out––as everything she has ever loved is being taken from her––even as her wild hair is already leafing out and some sort of new existence is taking hold.  I think this is the epitome of grief and it runs through so many of the poems.

The many languages of art-making figure prominently in my poems appearing in Plume, as it does in the collection as a whole.  Language is something we are born into, we swim inside, we employ to our varied purposes.  I think the act of bringing words to an experience leads us to feel we now possess it in a new way––and there is some truth to that.  But perhaps equally so, the result is that we are now possessed by that language, by that version of the actual (or the intuition of many diverse versions orbiting our stunned hearts.)  “Typos” is situated before the first section in the book, a kind of proem––and, as such, it possesses some of the DNA that becomes manifest throughout.  The poem begins with some of the wit and agility in which we writers take a certain pride.  But very quickly it becomes clear that the speaker is not in control of what is taking place––whether that is in the observed world, the echo of remembrance, or the mutability of language itself.  In my initial draft, when I got to the lines: “the lymph nodes,/irradiated, naked as nymphs, danced/ in a circle…” I felt as if I’d been lifted by the whirlwind and needed to hold tight to my pen, hoping that anchor might see me through.  “I’m/ marred by, married to this compulsive/ language and cannot shut it (shout it) out,/ even in this house of silence.”  I think this might well point to a kind of moment all poets experience when something surprising erupts on the page––and I remember feeling so grateful for––and a little unnerved by––what arises from this lifelong practice.

 

 

Julie Hanson on “Denise to the Rescue” and “Needs Art”:

Denise burst into my consciousness out of nowhere, already knowing her name and her purpose. It was clear from the get-go that she was distinct in her voice and her nature from the person I know as myself; that someone new had just entered the room was discernible both by her pacing and her particular sense of humor. Since I did not initiate the relationship, I’m not sure we can really call her a persona—a device I had never considered using, having lived most of my writing life without recognizing imagination as one of my strengths—although I have since come to realize that one can’t write much of anything, can one, without it, even if the imaginative remains on the small scale, tossing details into sentences that have come from who-knows-where, some long-neglected crevice of memory, perhaps. Possibly Denise’s appearance was prepared for years earlier by one of my many fed-up responses to one of those phone solicitations from persons representing organizations claiming to approach us out of our need while remaining bereft of any understanding of who the recipient is, what he cares about, or what she needs. Perhaps, on one such occasion I had the fleeting thought, “What if such a call could for once come in answer to a need I actually have?” Whatever it was that brought Denise to my ear, her stance towards myself as the writer she had called to counsel was, I thought, a most interesting mix of compassion and canniness. I was glad to continue to work with her for a couple of years until she came to her proper conclusion in October of 2023.

Needs Art” was first drafted in October 2022, and was completed quickly with few changes. So both of these poems qualify as writings from the years of our pandemic—although neither poem seems to have that matter much on its mind. Still, it strikes me now that they may each have been seeded by the circumstance of isolation, a desire to get outside the house of the self. Or, in the case of Denise, to stand outside it and look back, as if through someone else’s eyes.

A few months into the pandemic it’s possible that many of us were intuitively instructed to reach farther outside ourselves than we normally might for source material and for voice. Our lives were not merely feeling confined to a room; it’s as if they were the room. “Needs Art” stands apart from much of my recent work with a lightness of spirit, an open readiness to what might be offered from the outside. But like many of my poems, it is interested, more than anything else, in questioning the How and Why of things. It’s the kind of curiosity that leads naturally to close examination, often of a skeptical disposition. I think here, in “Needs Art,” it leads me into something more abstract and delighted.

 

 

Rachel Neve-Midbar on translating Abba Kovner:

While on tour in the USA in 1972 Abba Kovner told his audience: “When I write I am like a man praying.” Yet, he said, in the liturgy, “a man should not say his own prayer before the prayer of his community…But the community in which I..say my poems is half alive and half dead. Who are living and who are dead? I don’t know how to answer this question. But I believe there is one place in the world without cemeteries. This is the place of poetry.”

In every way, from how the poems sit on the page to imagery and syntax, Kovner’s poems reveal the tension of both losing and being lost. Like many Holocaust poets Kovner’s poetics born in the broken language of trauma: in a poetry of unrevealed codes, repeated metaphors and a personal thesaurus aimed at both concealing and revealing a torn soul.

Finding the way to express this tension in a poem in English is the challenge of translation.

Questions of how to reveal this tension came about in my translation of the poem “Only,” which is the last poem in Kovner’s book-length sequence My Little Sister. A pressure is created between the formal and informal language within this short poem. The very heavy, formal twisting image of a ship’s prow in an icy storm is sandwiched between strangely informal word choices. Kovner chose the Hebrew word “mita” (bed) to depict what I translated as “coffin” and “resting place.” In ancient Rome, in very rare cases the word “bed” was used as the word for something used to carry the dead to burial. However, Hebrew has other words for “grave” and for the places where one would bring the dead; “bed” is not amongst them. A bed is a place of comfort, of coziness. It’s a strange word choice. As is the word he chose for “mother,” repeated twice (as is the word “mita”) in the poem. The word Kovner chose is “Imi” which is a shortened and colloquial way of saying “my mother,” usually “Ima sheli.” “Imi,” not used in texts, is the comfortable, cozy and intimate way that a child would call to his mother. I therefore made the choice in my translation to end the poem with the word I would use if I, as a child called to my own mother in the middle of a dark night, “Mommy. Mommy”