Plume

Margaret Gibson on “In Praise of Transformations”:

I recycle, and the process begins with emptying, rinsing, sometimes soaking.  I don’t know how many glass jars I’ve soaked in dishwater over the years—but sometimes, there’s this just once when you see something ordinary differently.  Meditation practice, on or off the cushion, is also a form of silent immersion in which, without thinking, seeing may occur. The labels, the words, just float away.

Seeing is an action; and because I make poems, seeing is an action that may lead to a poem.

Words are tricky.  A word like transformation, especially if linked with the word spiritual, can signal a humble or natural process magnified, even idealized; thought about, but unlived.

Beginning with an everyday detail—the glass jar, immersed in water, its label blurred—this poem seemed to ask for simple words to suggest what, looking at it, I saw.

Likewise, the word metamorphosis is a wonderful mouthful, but this poem wanted to transform (aha!) that word by enacting it.  I wanted the final 5 or 6 lines to stay close to the process from the inside, to stay within the changing conditions of the pupa emerging as a winged thing, a quiet release into larger life and kinship with what is.  A release into transparency.  Air, air, air.  The ordinary is extraordinary.  The extraordinary is ordinary.

 

 

Peter Johnson on “Dispatches from Terra Incognita”:

I’ve always wanted to create a “new” genre, which accounts for my sequence-in-progress, Dispatches from Terra Incognita. I realize the grandiose narcissism of such a pursuit, but why not aim high? My “dispatches” are like notes in a bottle sent by an aging humanist stuck on an island where the grand narratives he has lived by and satirized have vanished under the weight of white male stupidity. But this sequence also allows me to do what I always do (though in an exaggerated way), that is, to juxtapose disparate short prose genres, along with their linguistic registers. I’m referring to the aphorism, the prose poem, the newspaper clipping, the personal anecdote, the journal entries of naturalists, random quotations, and so on. Then afterwards, I examine these fragments and look for some kind of thematic and/or narrative structure, excluding some fragments while shoring up others. Now I realize there are many contemporary books that have foreshadowed mine—Of All That Ends by Gunter Grass and Roadside Dog by Czeslaw Milosz, for example, not to mention works of long-dead poets and philosophers I have mentioned in a previous Plume essay https://plumepoetry.com/the-literary-fragment-black-humor-and-the-ampersand-three-short-essays-by-peter-johnson/ —but I think I bring a unique sensibility to Dispatches from Terra Incognita. I hope my readers agree.

 

 

Heather Treseler on her Three Poems:

The three poems appearing here—“Tenancy,” “Callas, 1954,” and “Halfway”—are from my new chapbook, Hard Bargain, which appears this month with Lily Poetry Review Books. Virginia Woolf asserts in A Room of One’s Own that “we think back through our mothers if we are women,” and this collection considers some of the cruxes in contemporary women’s lives—including the risks that women take and the hard bargains they drive, accept, and endure—to safeguard care and pleasure, to achieve autonomy, and to counter misogyny in politics, the workplace, and culture.

In “Tenancy,” the narrator enjoys her own postwar apartment with its jerry-rigged outlets and fluky appliances, reveling in the relative independence of her time and labor and the literal space and privacy that those rooms, in another allusion to Woolf, afford her. In “Callas, 1954,” the narrator explores the desire for transformation and transcendence that often undergirds art, religion, and sexual passion through the career, accomplishment, and tragedy of the legendary opera singer Maria Callas. And in “Halfway,” the speaker, recovering from an illness at midlife, thinks about the privilege and price of her solitude, what she has chosen to make of her life and the incalculable human freedom of that choosing, which she doesn’t—and can’t—take for granted.

 

 

Paul Christianson on his Two Poems:

I’ve been living in Việt Nam for the last decade, and I couldn’t have written either of these two poems were it not so.

Ăn cơm chưa translates to “Have you eaten (rice) yet?” but it’s also a common greeting that expresses care and concern for someone and their basic needs as well as a stand-in for “I love you” in families. This phrase, and the regularity with which it shows up when learning or sharing about Vietnamese language and culture, brought me to ruminations on food and its place within society. A few details, such as the golden buttons come from a dear friend (who even showed me one of the remaining buttons!). Thankfully, few people in Vietnam fear famine today, but most have or had relatives who wouldn’t have been able to say that not so long ago. So when fruits are placed on altars, they are who we can think of.

I wrote “How to Trick a White Person” when thinking about the many American tourists who are always pleasantly shocked by how warmly they are received here and how Vietnamese people welcome them without expressing resentment or desire to dwell on past wars. “I’m so impressed with your ability to forgive” is a sentiment and even a specific phrase I’ve heard numerous times from these typically white visitors. And while this ability to forgive is indeed incredible, I often wonder if the visitors would be capable of such forgiveness, even in response to much smaller offenses.

It’s worth noting that Vietnam has beautiful butterflies and the entire scenario of anyone saying otherwise to sell blankets is a complete fabrication. And while I wrote it thinking of America and Vietnam, it surely could have been written for many other places around the world.

 

 

Patricia Clark on “Midsummer Paralysis”:

Truth-telling: I have a love-hate relationship with writing prompts. Sometimes I want one, sometimes I think “well, just make up one for yourself!” and other times, I look at books or social media posts where other writers offer them. I have a visceral reaction: no, no, no! Why? Writing prompts can be too reductive, too simplistic, too limited in scope, too prescriptive

somehow. I recall graduate writing workshops, both at the University of Montana and then at the University of Houston where if one of the professors had mentioned giving us a prompt to write a poem, we would surely have scoffed, rebelled, laughed out loud and certainly have said, “No!”

Yet, we long to change from time to time as writers. Write something different. When I heard that poet Diane Seuss was going to offer a series of prompts for poems at The Academy of American Poets website last year, I thought, “Oh yes, I will check these out.” This poem grew out one of those prompts, one I found especially intriguing. As you probably know from her book frank: sonnets, Seuss is a big fan of the sonnet. Not the Petrarchan or the Elizabeth sonnets so much as the good old-fashioned American free verse sonnet. (Think: Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”) Seuss referenced a poem titled, “Lines Written During My Second Pandemic,” by Eduardo C. Corral. His poem served as the model. Her instructions were simple: write a 14-line, end-stopped sonnet with a repeated word in each line, a word chosen to represent an emotional state. Further instructions were to ignore narrative coherence and plot, and to highlight, privilege and celebrate the image. This mixture of freedom and constraint unlocked something for me, and I wrote “Midsummer Paralysis” in a flash (or so it seemed), though of course I also revised and tweaked the poem. Delightful to find a home for it in Plume.

 

 

Leah Umansky on “any Kind”:

“Any Kind” is a poem from my new manuscript, Ordinary Splendor, a book about wonder, joy and love. This is a poem about encouraging your eye to not only see, but to notice.  It’s also a call for kindness — something we desperately need more of these days.   The title of the poem comes from a title of a poem by my old friend Robert Harris, who is no longer with us. He was one of my favorite poets and a friend who always saw the world so delicately and beautifully. I miss him.   The italicised line is stolen (with appreciation) from DA Powell, from his social media feed last year.  He posted a photo of the moon, and some trees under night’s shadow, along with that line and it just spoke to me. I knew I needed to borrow it.  The friend with the bird cam is Sarah Marcus Donnelly and her bird cam account on Instagram has been one of my great joys in recent years. Those days I feel off, sad, or scared, and her bird cam feed pops up for me, those are special days. It makes me appreciate the fact that there is always something to marvel at and that marveling can take away the ache. The unexpected can be difficult, but sometimes just looking brings us wonder, awe and joy. I’m so pleased this poem found a home at Plume. Thank you.

 

 

Donald Revell on “Alone at the New Year”:

At the turn of the year, Plato’s notion that Time is nothing more than a moving image of Eternity, appears simply factual, a matter of infinite pause between forward and backward. And in that pause, this time around, I found a deepest solitude and was afraid. For me, allusion answers fear, turning it into something manageable, something familiar as allegory. And so my poem hurried to allusion—to my favorites: Plotinus and Augustine, Milton and Blake. Although unnamed, Milton appears in the beautiful phrase from his “Samson Agonistes”—favoring and assisting. Although unnamed, Blake enters in the form of his covering cherub. And as for Our Lady of Walsingham, hers is the original courage, taking the angel at its word. Here in my 70s, in the ice and strangeness of this new year, only courage seems to have any prospects, and I’ll allude to that.

 

 

Adrian Blevins on “Domestic”:

I have been interested in Robert Frost’s idea of the “sound of the sentence,” or what the poet Alan Shaprio calls “the shape of a consciousness in action” for many years now. It’s what I love most about poetry—this intimate sense of being inside the mind of another as it wanders through a series of mostly emotional discoveries. You might ask how this is unlike what happens in a memoir or a good novel, and what I think is that poetry, in the end, really is mostly or fundamentally music, and it’s music that we’ve been listening to since before we were even born, at that: down there, hardcore, heartbroken human music that we somehow know about from birth.

Anyway, meanwhile, as a way of maybe saying the same thing, I like Willem De Kooning’s idea that “content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash.  It’s very tiny—very tiny, content.” That’s why I begin this by way of sentence sounds, which just happen to be the idiosyncratic way I hear the heartbroken music of the heartbroken world.

You start with a feeling, and it’s unsayable. It’s a low-down humming about how pissed off you are at your kids for struggling in this world that will force us each and every one to struggle and to suffer. And you are pissed off at yourself too for expecting anything else. And at yourself for having those suffering kids in the first place. And at the fathers of your children for abandoning them, since you won’t since you can’t since you love them too much. It’s just a low-down, unspeakable humming feeling you have to try to find a way to put some music to. But the point of the poem isn’t to wag a self-righteous finger at your kids, your mixed-up wrong self, or some motherfucker of a AWOL not-daddy daddy-boy (the problem of which is, in the end, on you too). The poem? It’s a blues. And the blues? The blues come down from the heavens and up from the body to comfort us.

 

 

Nancy Naomi Carlson on “Food of Love”:

I confess that I’m not a fan of having to create on demand, as was the case for this poem, when my daughter requested I write something suitable to read at her wedding. She probably reminded me that I needed to resist the urge to write something “dark,” as that term describes most of my poetry, including the last poem she’d asked me to write—something about Jupiter, the Roman god, that could be set to music and performed by the community choir she founded and conducted. The Jupiter poem turned into “Juno’s Garden,” a villanelle that catalogued all the grievances harbored by Juno against her husband, leading her to create a special garden in which I imagine her burying the body parts of her rivals. Fortunately, rather than gruesome images, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night popped into my head, with its memorable line, “If music be the food of love, play on,” which eventually inspired the title. While researching the connection between love and music, I came across the information that most of the arts we engage in are also practiced by other animals, including spiders that weave and swallows that build. Swans were also mentioned and knowing that swans typically have one partner for life, I chose to end the poem on that optimistic note.