Plume

Mary Jo Salter on “So Glad She Didn’t Live to See It”:

“So Glad She Didn’t Live to See It” was a phrase in my head for years before it became a poem title and a poem. During those years several older people in my life died, and I found myself, despite my grief, being genuinely glad they hadn’t witnessed certain changes in technology, involving things they wouldn’t have known how to use or understand. Recently and specifically, I’ve been thunderstruck by the speed of change in how people think, remember, and create, because of artificial intelligence.

I often play a mind game in which people from the distant past visit my world. George Washington comes to my local pool and is shocked to see the bikinis, etc. I even inserted him in an early version of this poem. But I threw him out, because what I’m talking about isn’t funny. It’s that the next generation may face such a radical disjunction from how people around the world have thought about themselves as people that pre-21^st century generations may seem virtually a different species. Poets like to believe we’re writing for and to posterity. No, I’m writing for people alive with me now, the only people who understand what it is—or was—like to be us.

Ron Smith on his two poems:

for “Snow Begins at the End of the World”

 Death is indeed the mother of beauty. Humans seem intent on killing nature but nature seems quite capable of handling herself and us. Sure, climate change and political corruption in the 21^st century are formidable foes of a continuing Earth. But if we go on the way seem determined to proceed, my money is still on nature. We might destroy civilization in the next few generations, but we won’t destroy the world. Dystopia is a bland likelihood, I think, not a cautionary tale. So I’m personally trying to live today. Just live today. To see and smell the world. To take care to love my family and my closest friends. To keep my wits and my integrity What else can I do?

for  “. . . from free verse to free love . . .”

The Modernist explosion, now more a century old, is still echoing, still breathing in our bedrooms, snickering in our closets, hovering over our keyboards. Gossip is eternal, especially among poets, but the Modernists lived, really, mainly in their words, in their images and line breaks. And still so live. Sexual intensity is really more intensity than sex, isn’t it? And I’m guessing nobody knew this better than Eliot and Pound—and, I’m betting, Edna St. Vincent Millay, too, for all her shenanigans. Is this poem also trying to find a way to deal with the ever-present temptations of idolatry and some old grief? Surely.

Christina Pugh on “Echo (and Narcissus)”:

This poem began as a reaction to undergoing an echocardiogram, a medical test that produces images of the heart on a monitor in real time, visible to the patient.  These images of my heart were striking yet also disturbing, as the poem suggests: the echocardiogram allowed me to be a voyeur, in a sense, of my heart’s private life, which seemed very separate from my own.  It occurred to me that my ability to rest was dependent on my heart’s never getting a break, and I felt a little sorry for my own organ.

It is difficult to address these anatomical parts of ourselves, yet poetry has always provided an opportunity to do so.  And after writing the poem’s last line, in which the speaker takes responsibility for the heart’s plight and unhealthiness, I realized the narcissism in that very apology:  to make our “selves” fully responsible for our illnesses is to disavow the role of chance in what happens to us. This has a parallel in the myth of Echo and Narcissus, in which both characters are undone by their own misguided investments.

“Echo (and Narcissus)” is a poem in my manuscript *Autumn Zero,* which takes an abecedarian (by title) format.  The poem shares the “E” of its title with nearby poems titled “English” and “Eating Metaphysics.”

Jane Springer on her three poems:

I was co-writing a journal with a poet pal when she addressed me Rat Sis, a title I took to (and took!) because I quite admire rats and am curious to know how any being so maligned survives, proliferates, and thrives near folks bent on exterminating its kind. The concept of sisterhood also delighted, as my fam’s riddled with rivalries, exiles. We’d noted, in our missives, how it’s easier to write poems to a person who answers them—so we started a 2^nd journal. Of poems. What’s here samples my half of our epistles, which are really love letters to anyone who’s felt she had to, in one way or another, flee or outwit the boot-shadow falling over her form.

Sydney Lea on Two Poems:

“Old Pine, Old Friend”: With a doctor friend I’ve known since we were four, I’d been discussing another friend of that vintage. The doctor said he had cachexia, a medical term “that essentially means withering away.” I’d noticed in my most recent phone call to the sufferer–we live 400 miles apart– how he kept repeating himself. Subsequently my phone calls and emails had gone unanswered, and our doctor friend explained that he’d dropped, precipitately, into dementia.

Stunned by grief, I looked out on a diseased pine in our yard. It had to come down. But although I’d wielded a chainsaw for seventy years, cutting cord upon cord of firewood among other things, the job was beyond me at 82. I’d enlist the help of a son who’d spent years cutting down far bigger trees in Alaska. The notion of my helplessness depressed me.

Bad news about friends, increasingly frequent, and certain of my own health problems make memento mori a ready recourse– too ready, maybe. I thought of that son, his four siblings,  and their own children, and a bit of tempus fugit sneaked in too. Then the poem wrote itself; I hardly revised it. The well remembered thud of a felled tree seemed an apt closing figure, the imminent death of my oldest friend making for a metaphorical crash in my life.

Perspective: Like the other, and most of my poems, this one was launched by a physical                          circumstance. I caught myself standing still with a pan of the woodstove’s ashes to empty just                     as, again, I looked out at a healthier tree our flowering crab, caught short by the sudden arrival                       of winter so that its “fruit that didn’t get time to ripen.” In this case I dismissed memento mori               as “too easy.” The warmth of the stove was a comfort, as was my awareness that life goes on,                   like the river under its ice. Hence the title of the poem.

Because formal efforts often seem to lead me in what might be called “thematic” directions                     (though any poet knows that the form-content dialectic is nonsense), I elected, on a whim,                                  really, to make “Perspective” consistently decasyllabic. I’m not sure I can explain why such a          stricture is appropriate: it just feels that way.

Sharon Dolin on “Quandary”:

More narrative than I usually write, “Quandary” almost wrote itself in my notebook, except for its lineation. The situation presented itself to me and troubled me until I wrote it down, which did not solve my quandary over revealing my Jewish identity—which has only grown more difficult for me to do since October 7th, 2023—but gave me a way to externalize my dilemma. “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” wrote Yeats. In my poem, I think the two kinds of quarrels are both present and are not so easily distinguishable. The most surprising and disturbing moment for me was when I hit upon the metaphor of the bamboo. Some call antisemitism the oldest hatred. Alas, that I am/we are living through its ugly resurgence.

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