Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris on translating Lesyk Panasiuk:
The poems of Lesyk Panasiuk’s Letters of the Alphabet go to War (Sarabande Books, 2026) are both a testimony to a war-torn country, an era of cataclysmic change, and also to the quietest vibrations of life. When people tremble under the table, asking each other: “Maybe we’ve been dead for a long time,” the poet watches, takes notes—a new kind of intimacy is born.
How can any language, Ukrainian or English, bear witness as a country is bombarded while the world watches? “A Ukrainian word / is ambushed: Through the broken window of / a letter д other countries watch how the letter і / loses its head,” Lesyk writes. “How the roof of the letter м / falls through.” The language of these vivid, image-laden poems becomes a character itself—a living thing: “By the hospital bed of the letter й/lies a prosthesis it’s too shy to use./You can see the light/ through the clumsily sewn-up holes/of the letter ф—the soft sign had its tongue torn out/due to disagreements regarding/the etymology of torture.” Much horror resides in this music of witness, in this sur-real—no, not surreal; it is too real—documentary testimony. And yet, somehow, it also weaves a dreamscape. Woven from fear and anger, imagination endures.
Ellen Bass on “Crushed”:
I wrote the first draft of “Crushed” in June of 2021. My wife grows roses and I’d made a small bouquet for her nightstand. The past year had been rough for our family. We lost people we loved and were in mourning. At our age we’re also acutely aware of our own mortality. The only antidote for which is to root ourselves more deeply in life. And in love. Eros and Thanatos. The roses are gorgeous, but already the first petal has fallen. They—and we—are going down. But we have a choice as to how we go and I want to go down:
with the roses, darling, your mouth
crushed against my mouth
Hilde Weisert on “Looking Back on My Libido”:
Looking back feels like something I’ve done all my life (well, once there was enough distance for a “back”), but now, in age, it’s less an act of memory than of curiosity and sometimes bafflement. The possibilities of sound, meaning, and image that a poem offers are, for me, a natural way to recover my own lost world. The “lost world” notion is one of my preoccupations, with thanks to Randall Jarrell, one of my favorite poets and critics.
Who was this person with my name? How do I explain “myself” to myself? And of all the lost animating desires, libido seems the most mysterious. Bounded in time like the slim young-woman clothes I wore and can’t imagine wearing now. Inseparable from “me,” and then – not.
Although the lost person is a mystery to me, her feelings materialized in the physical images in the poem. Even if I can’t remember her, the poem is a way to reimagine my way into that life, and, I hope, for others to recognize something too.
I like to poke fun at myself, and I hope the title – my starting point — does that. The ending is more harsh than reality. Sometimes, it was love.
It’s a pleasure to have this poem in the good company of Plume writers and readers.
Joe Di Prisco on “National Poetry Month”:
I was getting on a plane the other day, first trip out of the country since before the pandemic, if you can believe it (I myself cannot). As I was packing, an activity that induces major OCD stressors, I irrationally throw into my carry-on a little pair of scissors that my very close friend gave me long ago. I had an attachment to those scissors for that sentimental reason. In any case, I mention all this because while passing through security before my flight they pulled me away to search my bags. That’s where they fixated on those scissors, which they pulled apart to reveal something I did not ever realize, namely that it also concealed a tiny knife blade. Leave it up to a poet like Dean Young to give me a tool that I thought would only cut the impractical and the extraneous was also one concealing that which could constitute in the hands of a deranged person a potential weapon. I think we call this in the poetry racket a metaphor, and that, knowing him, such a weapon in the hands of a poet could theoretically wreak wounds or poetry or both. Of course, they confiscated the thing, understandably, and I said goodbye to it, and also all over again to Dino. Remembering him broke my heart a little, all over again.
What does this have to do with my poem “National Poetry Month”? Let me see if I can explain. First off, I don’t have any personal attachment to the concept of National Poetry Month. Certainly no more than I do for Emotional Instability Month or National Bird-Feeding Month or National Pizza Topping Month or National Dog Lover Month, though put me down for both the Pizza and the Dog ones should they exist. Be that as it may, after my Collected & Selected Poems came out in 2024, I did a series of readings. I think they went all right, though how would I know? (Which is the anxiety that is the beating heart of the poem, I suppose.) A reviewer thought the book title My Last Resume sounded a bit foreboding. To be clear, I wasn’t dying except in the sense that we all are. So perhaps it’s a poem about performativeness, being before an audience, wishing to entertain a little, not necessarily before what anyone would call a throng, mind you, but others were certainly in attendance, and I appreciated them, after my own self-conscious fashion. Who cares that I wrote it during or about National Poetry Month? That was accidental, and how many poems that work seem like maybe just maybe successfully risked accidents? For the record, I did provide delicious pizza at one of my readings and did bring my dog. He was happy to be there, he told me. And nobody confiscated anything of mine that I read that I wouldn’t freely give away. Afterward, I wrote this poem.
Matthew Lippman on his two poems:
‘In Tears Across the Decades’:
For some time a few years back I was writing poems about crying based off the experiences, thoughts, feelings, that other people have/had about what it means to shed a tear. This is one of those poems. I was also thinking about the 90s in New York City, feeling nostalgic, remembering an old friend, Ted, who is a die-hard Knick fan. Those teams–Ewing, Starks, etc.–embodied the spirit of New York and given these current times, those of us who were inside that town, miss the vibe deeply. It makes us cry because what else is there to do.
‘Disorganizations of the Heart’:
Another nostalgia poem, for the skip in the LP record and my love of Pat Metheny’s music. That’s all this one is about and how music is magic, no matter how we hear it, and how it’s like outer space, too, endless and infinite and as close to the universe’s capacity to surprise as there is on earth.
Rae Armantrout on “On Explorers”:
I chose to write about this one because, on some level, it puzzles me. I don’t know if it’s a poem, a couple of stories, or an essay. The speaker (who is, ok, some part of me) sounds surprisingly exasperated. The piece uses the phrase “of course” frequently. There is probably some rule against that. I’m not sure why I wrote it. Really. It’s not news that women get a bum rap. In my versions, Sleeping Beauty and Eve get the credit they deserve. As I see it, Beauty and Eve both try to escape a trap. Eve succeeds. We should celebrate her. I am.
Jim Daniels on his poems:
These two poems come from very different places, but will both be in my next book, Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems, coming out next month. “Rowing Through the Ashes” started with the image of monks’ ashes stored in a cave that startled me into toggling back and forth in time, while “Dusk,” (the last poem in the book) was generated more by a mood than an image—something I felt one dusk that I wanted to evoke while (I think) talking to imagined readers.
Dennis Maloney on “Blossoms” & ‘The Road to Exile Barcelona / Collioure”
Both of these poems are in the new poems section of Clearing the Stream: New and Selected Poems 1975 – 2025 which will appear from Walton Well Press in early 2026.
Blossoms:
The spark of the poem begins with observing the flowering trees in our yard and learning yet another friend had died the night before. At my age I feel loss of too many friends and mentors.
As Neruda said “Together they were the sum of my light. Now, a small anthology of my sorrows.”
The Road to Exile Barcelona / Collioure:
This poem is part of Three Portraits of Antonio Machado. Machado (1875 – 1939) was one of the major Spanish poets of the generation of 1898. I have previously translated with Mary Berg, There is No Road, a volume of his Proverbs and Folksongs as well as Campos de Castilla/The Landscape of Castile. His work has been important to my own. This poem tracts his movements in the waning days of the Spanish Republic as it fell to Franco’s forces and he was ill and forced into exile arriving in the French border town of Collioure where he died and is buried.
Bruce Cohen on his Brief Portfolio:
Absurdist Manifesto: The Art of Collage
“Humans are creatures who spend their lives trying to convince themselves that their existence is not absurd.”
Albert Camus
Even though I don’t believe in the existence of writers’ block, I was stuck so I decided to look up some strange facts, occurrences, situations etcetera & the poem became a kind of absurd list poem. I’ve always loved the absurd. However, while many of these instances are true, I started making up some of my own or fudging semi-real events & the poem exploded. It could, naturally, be longer, but I had to stop somewhere.
Humpy Dumpty as an Embryo
Wherever we go, inside or outside of the country, we always visit art museums. Aside from my love for art, I’m even more interested in people-watching, the eavesdropping on conversations, the nutty things fathers say to their nine-year-old daughters about abstract expressionism. This poem came after a visit to my son in New York and a splendid afternoon at MOMA. For some reason, which I can’t remember, the poem assumed the form of a kind of multiple-choice exam.
The Art of Art (Today I Shall Be Marcel Duchamp)
I was thinking about the fake Modigliani that hung in the Met and nobody knew for so long. I suppose it didn’t deter anyone from enjoying the painting, not knowing, of course, that it was a forgery. I was thinking about the famous Duchamp story about the coat rack and people tripping over it at the party & Dadaism, how if everything is art nothing is art. Pop Art. Found Art. How does one define art? Maybe this is an Ars Poetica poem.
Poetry/Dance Night: Saturdays, Tucson, Circa 1981
This is really an autobiographical poem. My good friend, Tom Jackson, who is now dead, turned me on to 1950’s southern a Capella Gospel and this captures some of his wild dance parties. I remember dancing one night with my pal, Tony Hoagland, who is now dead, and chumming around at the same soiree with my two mentor-teachers, who are now dead, Steve Orlen & Jon Anderson. I miss them and was thinking about them.
Theories, Genealogies & Hypotheses
I’m intrigued by lost civilization & human evolution; I like reading about cultural & physical anthropology. I always want to hear about personal history & family stories. I suppose this is one of those poems. It’s kind of funny, this poem. I can’t help myself.
By the same author
Editor’s Note
Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 53 – December: Yes, and of course: Paris. Where when I first stepped…
Newsletter Issue #81 April, 2018
Readers: Welcome to Plume, Issue 81 April: and, God, I’d forgotten this Norman Dubie poem! Many thanks for Adam Tavel’s recollection below. I had the…
Editor’s Note
July: and, given the length and discursiveness of last month’s note, a reprieve, Reader: the briefest of remarks this time…