The Rusty Paperweight: August '24
Slings and Arrows, Robert Bly the Translation Guy, Hobbits and Goblins, Heaney's Letters, Dickinson's Herbarium
I love the colors of late summer in the Shenandoah Valley—especially the chicory, the Queen Anne’s lace, the purpling pasture grasses, and the first hints of yellow in the walnut leaves. Autumn foliage gets more attention, but one shouldn’t look past the beauty of an August morning.
New Verse Review’s first submission window ended on July 31. We had a tremendous response, and I am excited to share the inaugural issue with you later this month. Many thanks to all who submitted. It was an honor to read your work.
NVR will undergo a bit of a metamorphosis with the first issue. We will launch a website to host our issues alongside this weekly Substack newsletter. The two platforms will be highly integrated through links and RSS feeds.
Check out NVR’s submissions page for new information about submitting book reviews, essays, and interviews.
One last bit of NVR news. We will run a poetry submission window from September 15-21 for a special Halloween-themed mini-issue. We are looking for gothic poems ranging from the horrifying to the hilarious, from the uncanny to the atmospheric. We are also interested in other poems appropriate to the season and its holidays: autumn, Hallowtide, Día de los Muertos. The issue will be dedicated to the memory of Fred Chappell, a great poet of the weird and fantastic. More information coming soon.
Now, on to the links!
Kindred Spirits
The online journal Snakeskin, edited by George Simmers, publishes a new issue almost every month and often features witty rhyming lyrics. There was an all-rhyme issue back in June. The recently released August/September issue features great poems by Claudia Gary, Felicity Teague, Steven Searcy, Julia Griffin, and others.
In other form-friendly UK journal news, the excellent Bad Lilies will return in 2025 after a brief hiatus and is currently accepting submissions through September 30.
Around the Poetry World
Slings and Arrows
One of my favorite television shows is the Canadian comedy Slings and Arrows. Each season follows a hapless but loveable Shakespeare troupe as they try to stage a play. The first season is available on YouTube. It has some spicy language, so it’s probably not for the kids, but it is definitely worth a watch.
St. Thomas and the Forbidden Birds
On the Catholic Culture podcast, Thomas Mirus has a satisfying and substantive interview with James Matthew Wilson. It moves between readings from Wilson’s recent collection Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds and insightful discussions of meter and form in The Waste Land, Tennyson’s merits, the differing affordances of tetrameter and pentameter, and the broadening of lyric subject matter over time.
“On Memory, Poetry, and Form”
J.F. Martel and Phil Ford discuss poetry, memory, and form in this recent episode of the Weird Studies podcast. Along the way they recite and discuss Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Musical Instrument.”
“Hobbits, Goblins, and the Very Adult World of Fairy Stories”
Let’s keep it weird. Tara Isabella Burton is the guest on this episode of the Manifesto! podcast. She, Phil Klay, and Jacob Siegel discuss J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” and Christina Rossetti’s long, strange poem “Goblin Market.”
Robert Bly, Classics, and Translation
Christopher Childers joins Matthew Buckley Smith on a recent episode of SLEERICKETS to talk about translating poetry. (Be sure to check out Zara Raab’s NVR review of Smith’s collection Midlife if you missed it.) They work through a Robert Bly essay on translation, which they find occasionally insightful and frequently zany, and they also discuss Childers’s recent major publication—The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Verse.
Victoria Moul, “Do Ghazals Work in English?”
Speaking of translation, Victoria Moul argues at Horace & Friends that the ghazal form isn’t a great fit in English. I am more appreciative of English ghazals than Moul (please don’t stop submitting yours to NVR), but I found it an interesting and edifying piece. It begins with a helpful primer on the form and how it is usually deployed in English. Moul’s main conclusion about why she finds so few satisfying?
The looser the metrical structure of the rest of the poem, the greater the emphasis upon the repeated word or phrase. This is the nub of the technical problem I think: it is hard to find a way in English to prevent this word — especially when paired with often contrived rhymes — from dominating the poem in a way that swamps rather than reinforcing or opening up the meaning.
Poems Ancient and Modern
Here are two recent pieces that I enjoyed at the always-excellent Poems Ancient and Modern: Sally Thomas on Walter de la Mare’s “The Birthnight” and Joseph Bottum on Robinson Jeffers’s “Shine, Perishing Republic.” (The latter is good companion reading with Carter Johnsons’ recent NVR piece on Jeffers.)
David Mikics on Delmore Schwartz
At Tablet, David Mikics uses a new edition of Delmore Schwartz’s Collected Poems, edited by Ben Mazer, as the occasion to draw readers’ attention back to Schwartz’s actual writing:
Delmore, as everyone called him, was a boy wonder, opening the revamped Partisan Review’s first issue in 1937 at the age of 23, with his perfect short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” (The issue included work by Picasso, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Wallace Stevens, and James Agee, but Delmore’s story headed the table of contents.) Then his first book of poetry arrived, hailed by Allen Tate as “the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Pound and Eliot.” But he came to a dismal end, an alcoholic and pill addict burdened by paranoid fantasies. Since Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift and James Atlas’ classic biography, Delmore has been more celebrated for the legend of his wasted talent than for his actual literary production. Schwartz the writer has gotten short shrift.
Mikics finds Schwartz to be an uneven poet. He spent too much of his time and talent on an unwieldy Finnegans Wake-inspired epic poem titled Genesis. But he also wrote “a handful of lyrics that will live forever.”
Amit Majmudar on the divine Aum and Goethe
Amit Majmudar has a new book of criticism coming out in November. I recently read two intriguing essays by Majmudar. In the Marginalia Review of Books, he writes about “the divine Aum” passed down from Vedic Hinduism.
“Aum” opens hymns, prayers, sutras, and even some Upanishads. It has the same function as hwaet! in an epic like Beowulf, or the mysterious syllables (like alif lam mim) that sometimes crackle like static before individual Qur’anic suras. The syllable Aum, in that position, does not carry a specific meaning. The vibration clears the pipes, readies the reciter. Ritual adores preliminaries: the intricate preparation of the Vedic mandala before the sacrifice, the Brahmin’s morning ablutions before praying at sunrise; the washing before prayers or wudu, the unrolling of the mat; clearing off the desk before studying, and marshalling of pencils and textbooks; stocking up the house with a cradle, diapers, and baby clothes before the due date.
In New Criterion, Majmudar reviews the Penguin Classics edition of Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe.
Today [Goethe] is more revered than read, even in Germany, which prefers, I suspect, the intimate intensity of Rilke to the synoptic serenity of Goethe. Though some educated Americans might recognize the name (and wonder if they’re pronouncing it right), only a few have read the work. Swallowing the classical tradition (for, say, Iphigenia in Tauris) and medieval Middle European history (Egmont) is good preparation for reading much of Goethe; both strains braid together in Faust, which requires a large amount of prior knowledge to enjoy. The novelist is another author still, just as restless as the poet-playwright, swinging from sentimental (The Sorrows of Young Werther) to digressive and philosophical (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) and even scientific (Elective Affinities). Goethe had the rare problem of being universally competent. Most writers do one thing because that one thing is all that they can do; Goethe had choices, and he chose them all.
Christian Wiman, “Music and Mystery”
Christian Wiman has a rather astonishing review essay in Harper’s about Seamus Heaney’s letters that begins by discussing how Heaney’s poetry contributed to Wiman’s own poetic formation. It’s full of zingers and pithy asides, some of them in footnotes. It ends with a very American riff on the American poetic sensibility, then on America itself, and then back to American poetry again—with Heaney and Ireland as foils. Here's a sample:
I didn’t grow up right down in the clop and clabber as Heaney did, but I was, you might say, chicken-shit-adjacent. We lived in a small West Texas town where farming and ranching still had a natural purchase on people, and enough of my childhood was spent among hay bales and hayseeds that Heaney’s milieu seemed mine. The ferocity of need and nerves a young writer brings to his models makes “influence” seem too weak a word. I metabolized Heaney, the only living poet who has ever had such a claim on me. (There have been several dead ones.) One can come to resent such possession. One can develop a keen eye for the weaknesses in the work, can find oneself scouring interviews and essays for chinks in that armor of authority. I think that may have played a part in my willingness to read through eight hundred pages of The Letters of Seamus Heaney, may even be part of what has so unsettled me. Not that I’ve discovered chinks; quite the opposite, in fact. The man seems unassailable.
Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium
Poet, essayist, and editor Paul Pastor recently started a Substack newsletter titled The Rose Fire. His own posts, including a series of “fresh poems,” have been fantastic, and he has also invited some great guest posts. I’m saving Seth Wieck’s recent guest essay for next month’s back-to-school feature, but I thought many readers would be interested in Isabel Chenot’s essay, by turns literary, theological, and biographical, on “the enchanted hebarium of Emily Dickinson.” Here is a sample:
The violets Emily preserved in her herbarium above have since spanned more of time than Emily did. The labels slashed across their stems have been compared to her trademark em-dash, and every page seems to map some pucker of her soul—lavish, almost fairy whimsy (“Dropped into the Ether Acre —”), electric agility (“Bloom upon the Mountain — stated —”), the slant energy with which she clustered words (“I heard a Fly Buzz — when I died”). Can you feel the closeness of her breath while she bent over the book, in the metrical space between flowers?
If you’re interested in reading more about Dickinson’s poetry, check out Michael Rutherglen’s analysis of her “odd verb forms” in Literary Matters.
Cleaning the Well
I mentioned above that our Halloween mini-issue will be dedicated to the memory of Fred Chappell. At Slant Book’s Close Reading blog, I recently discussed two southern gothic poems, both titled “Cleaning the Well,” one by Chappell and one by Paul Ruffin.
We might call the protagonists of these poems Childe Chapell and Childe Ruffin, as in young unproven squires. This is perhaps more appropriate to Chappell. He grew up reading sci-fi novels and weird fiction pulps. He wrote some serious genre fiction, and his writings are seasoned with the Weird throughout. Consider Childe Chappell’s imaginings as he is lowered into the well:
…A monster trove
Of blinding treasure I imagined:
Ribcage of drowned warlock gleaming,
Rust-chewed chain mail, or a plangent
Sunken bell tolling to the heart
Of earth….
There are echoes of these fantastic imaginings in what young Chappell actually finds at the bottom of the well. The treasure trove becomes “Twelve plastic pearls, monopoly / Money.” The knight’s gear becomes a “Rubber knife, toy gun.” The “Sunken bell,” with its evocations of passing time, becomes “Clock guts.” Perhaps even the warlock is there, having met his end while in animal form, now “a greenish rotten cat.”
The Thing Itself
Boris Dralyuk, “Public Enemy” in Air/Light
Stephanie Staab, “The Innkeeper’s Wife” in 32 Poems
Maurice Manning, “Smite” in Appalachian Places
Orlando Ricardo Menes, “Havana, 1955” in Literary Matters
William Virgil Davis, “William Dean Howells Revisits Fresh Pond after the Death of Henry James” in Literary Matters
Adrian Matejka, “Another Circus” in Literary Matters
Liv Ross, “The Moth” in VoegelinView
Ethan McGuire, “Eight Ways of Looking at the Ozarks” in VoegelinView
Nicole Caruso-Garcia, “It’s a Fishes Cycle” in LIGHT
D.A. Cooper, “Moby Dick” in LIGHT
Mary Grace Mangano, “Subway Sestina” in Mezzo Cammin
Matthew King, “That’s Baseball” in Juniper
Sarah Rossiter, “Incline Your Ear” in First Things
Catharine Savage Brosman, “Dust Bowl” in First Things
E.C. Gannon’s “Summer on the Back Porch” in The Rappahannock Review
Maya Clubine’s “L’Heure Mauve” in Ekstasis
Nathaniel A. Schmidt, “The Ship of Theseus” in Ekstasis
Contemporary Classic
Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “Nightfishing”
An excerpt:
We drift in the small rowboat an hour before
Morning begins, the lake weeds grown so long
They touch the surface, tangling in an oar.
You’ve brought coffee, cigars, and me along.
You sit still, like a monument in a hall,
Watching for trout. A bat slices the air
Near us, I shriek, you look at me, that’s all,
One long sobering look, a smile everywhere
But on your mouth. The mighty hills shriek back.
You turn back to the lake, chuckle, and clamp
Your teeth on your cigar. We watch the black
Water together. Our tennis shoes are damp.
Something moves on your thoughtful face, recedes.
Here, for the first time ever, I see how,
Just as a fish lurks deep in water weeds,
A thought of death will lurk deep down, will show
One eye, then quietly disappear in you.