Collins, LaFemina, Dunphy-Leilii, et. al.

Martha Collins on Danielle Legros Georges’s poems:

When Danielle Legros Georges passed away in February 2025, she had completed the chapbook Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England and approved the final text for publication by Staircase Books. She didn’t live to see the published work, which will receive its launch at the Boston Public Library on June 10, or to see this issue of Plume, which features two poems that appear in it. As her friend and an avid reader of her poems, I’m deeply grateful to Plume for publishing the poems here.

In 2023, Danielle received a fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, for the purpose of researching Acts of Resistance, which she defined as “a series of poems about Black self-determinism and articulations of freedom within and against the context of Northern slavery.” For many weeks, Danielle took the train from her home in Boston to Worcester, where she did much of the research that led to the poems. “Mem and the Question of Mother Love” (in this issue) notes that the legal case at the center of the poem was “all over the local papers.” Danielle read those papers in the Antiquarian Society, and much more besides. These poems and others like them represent Danielle’s radical transformative act of turning historical material into memorable poems.

Gerry LaFemina on “Cheating at Solitaire”:

“Cheating at Solitaire” started with one phrase in the spring of 2024: “somewhere in Brooklyn my father is dying.” In fact that was truth, though I didn’t know it. My father and I had been estranged for the last 12 years of his life though I sometimes learned things about his health from my stepsister. I actually had that phrase written down for about six months before I actually started to work on the poem, not knowing where to put it: to start with such a line seemed melodramatic and to be working in a style of poem that I normally didn’t write in—it felt too “confessional” in a way I reject outright.

I also remain keenly aware that after nearly forty years of writing poems, I risk poems recycling sensibilities and images, and here we are: back in Brooklyn, back with my father’s poker playing, back to the subways and Coney Island, and back to tattooists, too. But the fact is: that’s the landscape of my time with my father. And the card playing of my father is key to the poem. He often gave me worn out decks of Hoyle playing cards from the club as a child, and I played solitaire. A lot of solitaire.

The poem took many drafts—probably close to 75 or so—before it found the right balance of tone, the way the cards come back in different ways that I hope don’t seem trite, and how much to use the anaphora of “Somewhere in Brooklyn…” Finding balance seemed essential to the success of the poem. And the poem couldn’t end on me or my father. Like the F train, like Coney Island, like Brooklyn, the poem is filled with others. These lives are interchangeable with those of the speaker and the father. The cards have to keep getting shuffled.

I didn’t know at the time that my father would be dead about a month after I finished the poem. I did know, though, while writing it that I wouldn’t talk to him before he died. The poem then is part elegy and part survivor’s story, the ending—of course—about the passage of time but that erosion is offset against the attempted permanence of the tattooing early in the poem.  That tension between what passes and what remains seems to be the essential energy of poetry.

James Richardson on “Either Out Far or In Deep”:

From a very young age I was fascinated by cosmology and nuclear physics – the extremes of scale – not that I understood them then or understand them now.   On the largest scale, the trillion galaxies out there are terrifying or humbling or calming, depending on your temperament.   On the subatomic scale, what’s around us and within us is no closer or more intimate  – there are no minds “in deep,” no selves, no lives.  What all this teaches is….I don’t know…but maybe that we are at once nothing and all that matters?   Anyway it’s somehow helpful to me to keep remembering that we are poignantly and temporarily suspended between far and deep.

That’s the overview of the poem, or maybe it’s the underview.  On the strictly human level, well, the eyes in the poem are mine, if slightly exaggerated:  one very farsighted , one very nearsighted.   As a kid, I was completely unaware of this.  Without knowing it, I automatically read books with one eye, distant signs with the other.   I was eventually told that I couldn’t possibly have any depth perception, but actually it seems “my two bad eyes together make one pretty good one.”   Somehow I managed to play high school tennis (though badly) without glasses, and throughout my Little League career I was a pretty decent center fielder.  Though  it’s true that my batting average peaked when I was nine, and that as my dreams of playing for the Yankees faded with embarrassing slowness I was drawn instead into fields where looking at things in at least two ways at once was not entirely a disadvantage.

Michael Mark: Explanation without an excuse but with an apology for:  I failed a bird, today”:

With all my being, I believe I would do anything to help and protect my grandson. As well, I believe, he, even at the age of 13 months, trusts completely in that, needs to. It was in the small city park, the badly hurt bird hobbled over to me from under a bush, dragging its mangled foot. It stopped at my shoe, leaning on it. The bird, to my unknowledgeable eye, seemed a fledgling, looked up to my face. Of course, I saw my grandson. That’s how metaphor works. Direct. No warning. And though I feel unquestionably, irrationally, responsible for every breath our grand baby takes, not just when babysitting, but always, I know I, as a human being, god-like as we can believe ourselves to be, are needed to be, absolutely cannot be trusted. I am so sorry, dear, sweet soul.

Rachel Hadas on her Two Poems:

“After the Floods” was written in the summer of 2024 in Vermont, where devastating July floods in the Northeast Kingdom area were an eerie replay of devastating floods in a wider area of the state precisely a year earlier.  The floods washed into a good deal of what I was writing at the time, as well as into my dreams, which always color what I write.

Often, as with the Palantir in Lord of the Rings, it’s not easy to tell whether a dream reflects the past or predicts the future.  In Part i of “After the Floods,” the diner zooming across a lake is a dream exaggeration of the inundation of Route 5 near Lyndonville, where the Miss Lyndonville Diner was indeed located.  The dream referenced in Part ii really happened, as did the conversation, but I tweaked the order.  X was alive and well at our last encounter in May 2024; now it’s May 2025, she’s ninety, and I’m having lunch with her tomorrow. That old chair in Part iii really was painted a vibrant purple by a house-sitter early in the summer of 2024.  And the receding flood waters from later that summer: did they really leave not only a muddy mess but also a landscape “glistening, transformed”?  That’s what a dream informed me, and I’d like to think it’s true.

The braiding together of dream and memory is simpler in “Cupped Hands.”  In fact, that poem refers to a memory – but a memory at once so distant and so somehow archetypal that it’s easy to mistake it for a dream.   The photo “Cupped Hands” refers to, taken around 1974, probably did appear in National Geographic – I never checked. But as I say in the poem, it’s hard “to tell the dreamed-of from the true.”  Soaked and boiled and seasoned, these chickpeas, I was told back then, would be still be edible after a couple of millennia.  And can’t poetry too season and cook and preserve?

Page Hill Starzinger on “Mastery” and “Idyll”:

I’d been thinking about aging in a way that regards its fruitfulness, its fertility. In revising these poems I realized I’d been subconsciously using the metaphor of “pollen” for skin cells I shed and the verb “flower” for cataract implants. So I ran with the idea. Maybe part of this fecundity has to do with the ingenuity of technology, allowing us to replace limbs and joints.  The evolution of the human body is strange and ghostly; I began considering it “falling up” rather than “falling down.” A photo of a spry Alex Katz, at age 95, painting atop a tall ladder, reminded me how some people are young at an old age and still masterful. I thought about several artists, including Brice Marden, creating luminosity in their eighties. How glorious one can be within constraints and, some might argue, more creative. Maybe the rectangle in “Mastery” is a metaphor for those restraints. I end one poem here with Edward Hopper who manages to dissolve restraints in a figurative painting—emptying the image of ceilings, walls, nothing in the background except darkness—all within the traditional rectangle of a canvas. A “new moon” indeed.

Sara London on “Horse in Snow”

I wrote an early draft of this poem during the pandemic. I was driving from my former hometown of Burlington, Vermont, to my home in western Massachusetts. The world was on pause. It was cold and snowy, and I was passing through a rural stretch of nearly purgatorial whiteness. When I spotted that horse, I think I was ripe for the kind of magnetism it proffered. The image resonated as some kind of redeeming truth at a time when so much seemed to be slipping permanently into the rearview. That dignified equine profile imprinted itself on my mind, and summoned that other “gift” of Trojan lore — though this New England horse was the purer country cousin, a clear antagonist to tricks and treachery. In my sorrowful mood, I’d gained a companion of sorts. The poem went through revisions for a while, and when I eventually came to see that tail as a “tired flag / wild rag,” I felt I’d arrived at a more precise and impactful meaning. The poem helped me express deep mourning for our nation; those “boundary lines” — our sad divide — haunted me then, and unsettle me even more today.

Author: Plume

Plume: Plume Issue #166 June 2025