Olga Maslova on her four poems:
Light—Thesaurus began when I was watching the light spread through the maple leaves on my porch. The feeling it gave me was exactly the same as one I’d had when I was nineteen—or even younger—when, in late May or early June, the sun would shift to flood my apartment in Kharkiv.
That was also the season of the first strawberries in Ukraine, which one could only get in June (there were no strawberries before or after). Looking at that maple light, I realized that when I first felt it, it was a singular sensation—one that encompassed the moment in its entirety. The word light, or strawberry, became a self-contained universe. It didn’t need any additional explanation or synonyms.
Negative Space was inspired by a painting by my dear friend Lucy Milko, who drew the silhouette of a fox in a boat, drifting through a rain of cherry petals. The poem holds a unity of space and time: that morning, I swam in a small lake near my house and saw a green heron perched in the branches; in the evening, I attended a performance of the St. Matthew Passion by a local community choir; and that night, I went swimming again and saw bats and bullfrogs.
The phrase “singers of all experience levels united by their interest in music” came from the concert program—and yes, it quite literally meant all experience levels.
The song in Blue Canary, which I first heard as a child, was performed by Russian clown Slava Polunin all over the U.S. It is exact in its depiction of our collective, universal vulnerability, misfitness, and desire to belong. (You can see one of the performances here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBddtLUJ-dc )
In Dear Hieronimus, I simply wrote down what happened. It was a very dark hour for me. I was questioning the validity of a world that wants to discard what it doesn’t understand. I wrote that poem so I wouldn’t feel so lonely—and to let Hieronimus know I hadn’t forgotten him.
I guess loneliness is a prerequisite for many of my poems—just as much as happiness is.
Liang Yujing on translating Dai Weina:
To translate is to imitate, to perform, and to speak in the author’s tone. Dai Weina’s poetry is a miscellaneous symphony of feminist voices, a kaleidoscopic lens that reflects her complex, meticulous thoughts and feelings. As a translator, I had to carefully examine every nuance in her diction and tone, making every effort to re-create a new piece, in the manner of embroidery, with a totally different language. The most interesting—and challenging—part of this work lies perhaps in the fact that I, a male translator, had to imitate a female poet’s voice. Is poetry translation a gender-specific activity? Does the translator have to be of the same gender as the poet he/she translates? Some think so. Years ago, my translations of a female poet were declined by a feminist magazine that insisted on the translator being also a woman. I doubt this idea, for no one is completely masculine or feminine, and each person has its unique place on the gender spectrum. I have been enjoying translating female poets like Dai Weina, imitating their voices, performing their roles on the paper, and trying to speak the way they speak. There is a lot of fun in this cross-gender imitation on my part. Dai Weina imitates, too. In “Misfortune of the New Moon,” she imitates the voice of Li Wenliang’s wife. Thus the whole thing is, I imitate Dai Weina who imitates another woman. The both of us—the poet and the translator—perform someone else’s role. On this chain, each link is forged by imagination.
Carol Muske-Dukes on “Elegy for Jane”:
I took the liberty of borrowing the poet Theodore Roethke’s title “Elegy for Jane”, a poem written for his student who died in a horseback riding accident.
My elegy is for another Jane – for Jane Mead, the late poet and dear friend who died in 2019. Roethke declares love in his elegy for his student Jane, but “neither father nor lover”, he has “no rights in the matter.”
I don’t know what “rights” a poet must possess to declare love and grief in an elegy, but in this time of censorship from left and right, perhaps I need to assert my own rights, ahead of this poem.
I loved Jane and I grieve Jane’s loss. Yet I still feel robbed by the merciless fate that took her life (cancer) after sparing her life months earlier (the Napa fire.)
I recently evacuated from the Palisades fire here in Los Angeles as I watched flames take the houses on my block. Just as I once walked the blackened earth of Jane’s family vineyard with her. Then we talked about how powerful transformers near the vineyard blew out the night of the fire, how the utility company was to blame. This has happened again, as Jane knew it would.
She and I went on a coast-to-coast reading tour together in 2018, celebrating my book, Blue Rose – and Jane’s brilliantly titled book, “Money, Money, Money, Water, Water, Water.”
She was at my house in Santa Monica later that year, when she got a phone call about a biopsy she’d earlier undergone. She flew back to Napa the next day and was told that she had a rare uterine cancer. I saw her again in New York City at her apartment near Sloan Kettering cancer research center. She had hope, but had no illusions: she also needed luck.
But luck left her. So here’s my elegy, standing by. And her poems standing by – like no one else’s. And the poet’s vineyard where the green vines and grapes have come back, like luck, like Jane’s world of unmade & made.
Jen Karetnick on “Snowfall, with Reconciliation”:
A couple of decades ago, while I was studying for an MFA in fiction at University of Miami, Maxine Kumin was a visiting professor. Unlike other contemporary MFA programs, the creative writing program director at the time, John Balaban, didn’t restrict us by genre, and so I was allowed to take her class for credit. It was a pivotal experience for me. Four years out from my first MFA in poetry at University of California, Irvine—where poets and fiction writers were so deeply siloed we barely knew one another—I had just started to write formal verse. Maxine was genuinely interested in my budding attempts. I also found such a kind, receptive cohort in her workshop that I became great friends with my poetic peers, several of whom I still count as dear colleagues.
I morphed into something of a neo-formalist, writing more and more of my poems with constraints. And then I began inventing my own forms. Which is why, when I found myself assigned to the Maxine Kumin studio at Vermont Studio Center–my first multi-week residency after raising two children– it felt very appropriate to make a form in homage of Maxine. Using only her poems, I created this piece. I then wrote 22 more of what I came to call “ekocentos,” meaning ekphrastic centos that comment on environmental and/or social justice. These poems became the second section of my manuscript, Sensor Hypothesis, which was a finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series and shortlisted for the 2024 Dzanc Poetry Prize.
Daniel Tobin on “Sea Star” and “Beckett’s Dream of Carickmines Happened”:
The idea for “Sea Star’ came spontaneously when I began reading a piece on starfish, though I preferred the less-often used name “sea star.” Hence, the title. The decision to work in syllabics also came instinctively, at least after I had composed the first stanza. The sea star is in many ways an ideal creature, minimally assertive, despite its shape, analogous to that of a human hand, from which the poem derives its conceit. Something in the back of my mind—in addition to Plato–might have brought me to St. Augustine and his idea of concupiscence, or “anxious grasping.” Concupiscence, one might say, is the outward sign of original sin, from Augustine’s perspective, though one doesn’t have to travel back to the 5th century or embrace theology to find the kind of inexhaustibly selfish grasping he means—at once the inward spur, one might say, for human evolution, as well as its self-consuming terminus.“Beckett’s Dream of Carrickmines” got its own spur from the weird (to my mind) fact that the author of Murphy, The Unnameable, Krapp’s Last Tape, Waiting for Godot, and the like, enjoyed hitting the links outside of Dublin before emigrating to France. He was apparently quite competitive. The poem, taking Beckett’s vision of things into account, found its way to imagine what the endgame could be, all things considered.
Marilyn A. Johnson on “Standing in a Field”:
A car full of teen girls, misdirected by a map app, drove into a pond; instead of breaking a window, they lost precious minutes calling 9-1-1 and sank in the sealed car. Like many stories of young people in terrible trouble, this one haunted me. What could anyone have done to help? What would I have done?
This was originally a smaller, sparer poem. I’m indebted to two wise readers, who urged me to expand the poem, one at the beginning, one at the end. I became an observer planted in the field, a useless witness. The need to keep sifting through the tragedy reminded me of one of the archaeologists I wrote about in my nonfiction book, Lives in Ruins, who walked the newly-plowed fields of farms, searching for arrowheads and other artifacts.
That’s it. I can’t clear that scene. I’m stuck in that field.
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