Zubieta, Laux, Martin, et. al.

María José Zubieta on translating Idea Vilariño:

Translating Idea Vilariño’s verses was not only an homage to one of the poets I most admire, it was also a joy, a quiet privilege to have spent years immersed in her poetry. It took me ten years to feel at peace with my translation, ten years shaped by the weight of Vilariño’s place in Uruguay’s literary canon, and by the intimate truth that she was the first poet I read with passion in my early twenties, and still do.

For most of my life, I’ve carried an intangible bond with Uruguay, a tender and inherited nostalgia, having left the country as a child after my father’s release from political imprisonment during the civic-military dictatorship. In this sense, translating Vilariño has become more than a literary endeavor, it has been a way of searching for, and beginning to find, my own identity as a Uruguayan.

 

 

Dorianne Laux on “Why are white butterflies always in pairs”:

Cabbage moths appear here in Richmond, CA every year, and every year I see them arrive in pairs.  A person of reasonable intelligence would assume they’re mating, and yet, I felt the need to be sure and looked it up, discovering a few other facts about these lovely and loving creatures I included in the poem.  Describing the females face became the close focus moment, and that led me to think about her “attractiveness”.  Then voila, an ending arose.  When I went back to check Google I found that I may be speaking of a Cabbage White Butterfly vs. a Cabbage Moth, and learned even more facts. Too late, alas, to include in the poem.

 

 

Diane Martin on “Practically Home”:

This prose poem happened. That is, this is the way it happened to me as juror in a case ending in accidental death not twenty minutes away from where I live. The case was dramatic—a DUI in the heart of wine country, in the middle of the pandemic, where elaborate anti-alcohol technologies were available (and weren’t used?), the conclusion foregone that the defendant was under the influence, the thank-god revelation that the twins’ car seats were empty, the heartbreaking youth of both defendant and victim. Twenty years prior to being called to this jury duty, I sat in at another Greek tragedy, as an alternate. This time—as an actual juror—I was eager to weigh in. What would I have decided? I never did say—appendicitis got me. Maybe that’s why I wrote Practically Home, to lay it all to rest.

 

 

Hank Lazer on his two poems:

The two Plume poems are part of my poetry collection The Silver Bowl Is Filled with Snow forthcoming (late 2025, early 2026?) from Dos Madres Press.  These two poems are from a section called Three Is A – a burst of poems with three words per line and lots of compressed twists and turns along the way.  The 12.7.2024 (2) poem begins with a quick twist, the opening words break off from the complete Yiddish proverb “burdens are from God and shoulders also.”  As for 12.19.2024, indeed: “where does/ our reading go”?

 

 

Katherine Soniat on “Instinct”:

Kingdoms that Float, an Undertow: “Instinct”

After completing twenty-five pages of my New Poems (Authority) to accompany Selected (1984-2025), I was faced with the almost larger task of how to arrange the New, for most poems were quite different. The title Authority became the connective tissue.

The first poem in this run of twenty-five, “Double-Time” comes in flashes of the streetlight, a steamer trunk and a man then struggling to stand inside his own open trunk. Nothing good going on here. This first poem makes every effort to report shifting scenarios. A crime.

Next morning an empty damp bathing suit tossed in front of the house.

The other poems would find connections in the subtle but skewed angles in which the word authority can be defined. Reinvigorated.  The poem “Instinct” is the second poem in Authority, and isolates integral and reappearing images from “Double-Time” in flashes and hearsay. Never sure. Always questioning, the narrator at the window tries for a syntax of sorts from quivering implications. Narratives deconstruct and reconstitute. The first poem, “Double Time” remains as a primal source for other takes on authority further on in New Poems.

There are three poems other than “Instinct” which also use recurring imagery from “Double-Time.” My own writing and rewriting of these New Poems, finally, became a journey into a personal PTSD of sorts.  Re-visioning such horror.  An undeniable trip into “here we go, but the insides of each of these four more direct poems must reproduce a twist. Something unknown before. . . another run at being squeezed out thoroughly.

Ultimately, the trick was to discover the exact arrangement of the detail within each poem. Echoes.  Then the derangement of expected placement in the table of contents. . . so that poems before and after more pertinent poems were only seemingly unrelated. This was a crucial role in establishing a wobbling narrative. This poetic dependency created a wider, more encompassing new implication for authority. Threads of another color woven in. New strands standing out.

All of this rewriting was redreaming actuality. Two years with it, and in it. Precision the way in, and a way out.   Rebuilding nightmare selectively.   And why dreams are mysteries. But not really.  Poetry too.

from INSTINCT:

Nothing helps make sense of what it is to watch a man fall to all-fours and crawl the gutter— metal bottom scraping the asphalt. Half-asleep, I wake to an old steamer trunk stop making noises.                   Trunk and man in position then by the backdoor of his car.          Waiting. 

 

 

Celia Bland on “False Elegy”:

This poem began in couplets and became, in revision, free verse. But I wasn’t happy.  It became a prose poem, was forced into triplets, but I still didn’t like its voice. As one in a series I’m calling “False Elegies,” composed after my mother’s move into a rest home — that being the best I could do for her and, in her view, the worst I could do for her — I describe what it’s like when choices are limited to the impecunious and shabby. I hope these lines sing a spare music that echoes my mother’s fraying vitality. I hope that I have eulogized her creative urge with one of my own.

 

 

Gregory PLUME response on:

Small Ode to Un-Earth
Un-Earth: A Sequence
Pedagogy of Trauma or An Account of What I Learned

These three poems are from a new collection We Interrupt This Broadcast which Norton will be out spring of 2026. They appear sequentially in the book.

I think of myself as writing brief lyrics, so “Small Ode to Un-Earth” would be described by that notion. “Un-Earth: A Sequence” builds on the small ode, plays around with the notion, ends in a place where the personal/autobiographical shows up. The third poem “Pedagogy of Trauma or An Account of What I Learned,” I’d characterize as a lyric sequence proper. I’m not much of a narrative or a descriptive poet, so I sometimes like writing lyric sequences because then you can try for the compression and intensity of lyric, but by juxtaposing lyrics in a sequence you can also get or hint at a larger narrative arc (two for the price of one).

“Pedagogy of Trauma” begins solidly planted in autobiographical scenes or situations—late childhood on up through adolescence and then, in the last three sections, morphs into what might be called “idea lyric”—where the “I” digests, ponders, assimilates the earlier experiences—all with the movement toward what moves me and keeps me going: the writing of poems.

 

 

Brian Culhane on his poems:

“Voice”

When I drafted “Voice,” I’d been reading the late work of the Scottish poet W.S. Graham. In those poems, Graham’s pared down style has been compared to the prose of Samuel Beckett, and I can see the similarity, though Graham has a less ironized, less nightmarishly humorous approach to his subjects. Or so my ear tells me when I read over his poems and mentally hear his voice. It’s the veiled nuances of tone, the nooks and crannies of diction, the patterning of syntax that compel us to attend to the sound of a poem—what Frost called the sound of sense. Yet even as I consider how best to characterize his (or any) voice, I feel language resisting such naming, evading descriptive adjectives the closer I try to pin it down—a version of the Heisenberg principle (or, as Graham says, “I always meant to only/Language swings away/Further before me” (“The Dark Dialogues”).

“The Dutch Room”

Reading Anthony Bailey’s Vermeer: A View of Delft and Simon Schama’s Rembrandt’s Eyes led me to visit the National Galley in D.C., where I was wholly absorbed by the four Vermeer’s on view. At the same time, I found myself watching as other museum-wanderers gazed at these paintings, too. The resulting poem is, I suppose, ekphrastic only to the extent that the unnamed Dutch artwork the two schoolgirls are studying is central to the narrative, if only minimally described toward the poem’s end. The boy who intrudes on the scene is wholly my own invention.

 

 

Linda Bierds on “Rembrandt and the Great Drought”:

I have a reproduction of Rembrandt’s last self portrait on a wall near my desk.  For years I have tried to find, through drafts of poetry, the essence of its effect on me.  Some time ago, I read about the 1540 drought in Europe.  In terms of my efforts with this poem, I knew that drought!

I rarely use the autobiographical “I” in my poems.  This time, though, if I entered the poem as a contemporary speaker in Rembrandt’s studio, perhaps I could find a solution. As I wrote, Rembrandt’s struggles to capture “the light that rises from within” became my own. Throughout my life as a poet I’ve kept a journal of what I call “orphaned images”: objects, phrases, phenomena that have arrested my attention but haven’t found a home in my poems.  The mirage was an orphaned image.  Its mystery and frustrating promise provided the vehicle I needed to complete the poem, which became not a reflection of “the light within” but an agitated meditation on striving.