The Rusty Paperweight: July '24 Links
Iron Maiden, Lyric Tragedy, The Harlem Renaissance, Jane Kenyon, Spirit Guides, Barflies
New Verse Review is open for submissions until July 31. Send us your poems!
Our little college town has a few downtown gems: a movie theater, a tabletop game store, a couple of bookstores, a yarn shop, an arcade. My older daughters and I recently spent an afternoon at the arcade. They wanted to beat me in the racing games or rock out on Guitar Hero, but to their chagrin, I kept returning to the immaculate Iron Maiden pinball machine pictured above. It allows you to pick your soundtrack as you play. It had “Fear of the Dark,” one of my Maiden favorites, but my preferred track was, of course, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the thirteen-minute metal paraphrase of Coleridge’s classic poem. I teach Coleridge’s “Rime” in my Moby-Dick seminar, and I always share the link to Iron Maiden’s song as well.
Kindred Spirit
Autumn Sky Poetry Daily
Christine Klocek-Lim publishes one poem each weekday at Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. It’s a great system. You email in a poem. If it doesn’t show up on the website within one week, you can assume it wasn’t selected. Checking to see if your poem has been picked adds a little excitement to the morning. Klocek-Lim recently elaborated on her approach here. Her tastes are wide-ranging, but she has an affinity for sonnets. Three recent examples: A Shakespearean sonnet about hydrangeas by Jane Blanchard, a slant rhyme sonnet about wombats by Devon Balwit, and a jackrabbit sonnet with some Hopkins-esque turns-of-phrase by Brendon Sylvester. Please note that Autumn Sky Poetry just went on summer submission hiatus until August 5.
Around the Poetry World
Shane McCrae Interview
At the SLEERICKETS podcast, Matthew Buckley Smith has a long interview with Shane McCrae. One topic of conversation is McCrae’s interest in metal music, or at least in two particular sub-genres of metal music. (I include a link to a McCrae poem below that is, to my mind, pretty darn metal.) It’s a wide-ranging discussion, though, covering poetic inspiration, scansion, parables, and how poems can be both smarter and more ethical than their authors. I highly recommend it.
Seneca’s Lyric Tragedy
On the Sacred and Profane Love podcast, Jennifer Frey talks to Dana Gioia about his verse translation of Seneca’s tragedy The Madness of Hercules, recently published by Wiseblood Books. Gioia begins by defending Seneca against widespread claims that, as a tragedian, he is derivative or sensationalist. His first rebuttal is a good one. Seneca was the major ancient influence on later masters like Marlowe, Shakespeare, Calderon, and Racine. Gioia goes on to argue that Seneca’s “lyric tragedy” inaugurates the psychological sophistication that will mark these later playwrights. Hamlet is a reference point throughout.
Elijah Perseus Blumov on Ten Poems
One more podcast for the July roundup. At the Versecraft podcast, Elijah Perseus Blumov takes us on a quick tour of ten of his favorite poems, including poems by Ben Jonson, George Santayana, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, and Catherine Chandler. One of the poems he discusses is Tennyson’s very metal “The Kraken.” (Last metal reference, I promise.) Blumov is an exceedingly perceptive critic, especially—but not only—in matters of form.
Les Murray Addendum
I had some nice reader correspondence about the recent Les Murray post. Christian Casper recommended this excellent 2015 profile of Murray by Alan Jacobs, available in the Books & Culture archives.
Step Right Up!
The Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry, is accepting entries to its annual contest from July 1 through September 1. Allison Joseph is this year’s judge.
Fare Forward, “a Christian review of ideas,” is accepting entries to its poetry contest through July 15. Whitney Rio-Ross and Nadine Ellsworth-Moran will judge.
The Sewanee Review will accept entries to its contest through July 31. It has fiction, nonfiction, and poetry categories. Shane McCrae will judge the poetry submissions.
The Bells of Hell and Edna St. Vincent Millay
Poems Ancient and Modern continues to post excellent poems and commentaries each day. Check out Joseph Bottum on dark humor in World War I poetry and Sally Thomas on the ambivalence of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo.”
The Harlem Renaissance
Several write-ups have been published about the Met’s Harlem Renaissance show, which runs through most of July. (There is a video tour on the Met website for those of us who can’t make it to NYC.) Susan Tallman has a long piece in The Atlantic, for instance, and Clifford Thompson has a review in Commonweal. While the show focuses on visual art, there are plenty of literary tie-ins and portraits of several writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Here’s Thompson:
…[Alain] Locke added, “By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.” That emancipation largely took the form of creative expression—the literature, music, and visual art that flowered in the 1920s and ’30s and reflected the experiences of millions of African Americans who, seeking opportunity, migrated from the South to the cities of the North and Midwest. Many settled in New York City’s Harlem, including writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay, as well as music and entertainment luminaries like Cab Calloway, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.
And when it came to the Black Americans’ effort to, in Locke’s phrasing, “see” themselves, that was the work, quite literally, of the Harlem Renaissance’s sculptors, photographers, and, especially, painters: African Americans using the visual arts to represent who and what they really were, in all their richness, variety, and humanity, to avoid looking to others for cues for seeing themselves.
Maya Popa reviews Jane Kenyon: The Making of a Poet
Jane Kenyon could invest even the sparest lyric about, say, flowers or finding an ancient gray hair in the crack between floorboards with intensity. Kenyon was married to celebrity poet Donald Hall (her former professor). Hall, who loved baseball, was a poet with a success rate like a good batting average. He had hot streaks and clutch hits and grand slams, but he also had book-length slumps. Kenyon had her whiffs, too, but she batted much closer to 1.000. The 1993 Bill Moyers documentary about Hall and Kenyon is available online and well worth a watch.
Dana Greene, who has also written biographies of Elizabeth Jennings and Denise Levertov, recently published a book-length biography of Kenyon, one that especially focuses on her bouts of severe depression. Maya Popa provides an extended review for the Poetry Foundation:
The many pains of Kenyon’s life had the effect that fog does on light. As a fog refracts and lifts, it catches impossible variations; as it clears, what’s there to be glimpsed is seen with a clarity whose insight is hard-earned (“The soul's bliss and suffering are bound together,” Kenyon wrote in “Twilight: After Haying”). She believed in—embodied—a spirit of resurrection and regeneration, having so often experienced a miraculous return to sanity and ease.
Literary Matters
The summer issue of Literary Matters is a treasure trove. I sincerely hope it isn’t the last. I haven’t had a chance to read the whole issue yet, but I highly recommend Brian Brodeur’s interview of A.E. Stallings:
Constraints are freeing in themselves, though, as formal poets and avant garde poets tend to agree. They free you from feeling that you are entirely in control. They give up some control to language itself, or the subconscious, or, if you like, the Muse.
I also recommend Mary Grace Mangano’s review of Rhina Espaillat’s new translation of the poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz:
Rhina Espaillat’s translation of the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz offers a glimpse of a highly intelligent and gifted writer who saw through the hypocrisy of her social environment, a poet-philosopher-nun who defies categorization and could be mistaken for a contemporary writer, so far ahead of her times does she appear to have been.
Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams as Spirit Guides
Baron Wormser’s essay “After Poetry Month” at Vox Populi is something else. It’s a manifesto about the importance of poetry and how we can approach it in our reading—and in schoolrooms—so that it orients us within life’s “reeling.” He takes Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams as his “spirit guides”:
William Carlos Williams spoke of poetry bringing us news but that seems only part of the story. The full story has to do with vision, how a poet can put together in words something that is unique and that takes us to a place of understanding and feeling that deepens our sense of being human. Again, this may not matter to people since it seems too subjective. Indeed, it is subjective. Poetry is notoriously subjective—one more reason to avoid it. Yet poetry may lead us forward into that place of vision where spirit has elucidated some fraction of life’s mystery. Naturally, the mystery remains and that is part of the pleasure of poetry, how it consorts with the mystery but then must leave. Dickinson loved to summon up the specter of infinity but she knew how finite a poem was. Those quatrains were a tangible container, a very modest stage, and a springboard into the unknown.
I Heard a Barfly Buzz
Is Michael Lista’s poetry a “spirit guide”? I don’t know, but it sounds like bruising dark fun. Here is Nicholas Bradley reviewing Lista’s recent collection Barfly in The Walrus:
Now, I can’t say where the persona and poet diverge. I’ve never met Lista. He plies his trade as a crime reporter; I teach poems about trees. He wrote a book called Barfly; I track my heart rate as if it were the Dow. Basically, I’m no fun. This makes me an unlikely reader of Lista’s poems, which are fun, completely miserable, and almost certainly bad for you. Barfly should be affixed with a Health Canada warning. You must be nineteen or older to purchase this product. Not safe in any amount. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
The Thing Itself
A.M. Juster’s “Postscript to Lost Neighbors” via the Scottish Poetry Library. Here’s an excerpt:
We tracked his path through phone calls made too late,
and we were told to answer tersely “No”
when operators asked if we would pay
the charges for his calls from Mexico,
Miami, Brooklyn, Denver, San Jose,
then Vegas, where before his call would go
into a dial tone, we heard his pleas
for help with debts he owed to gangsters, who
he claimed were threatening to break his knees.
Shane McCrae’s “The Speech of the Thin King’s Minder” in Conjunctions
Ernest Hilbert’s “From the Balcony on Heavy Metal Tribute Night at the Trocadero” via E-Verse Radio
Claudia Gary’s “Elegy for Our Own Words” in ONE ART
Regan Green’s “Dyersburg Fairview Cemetery” in Literary Matters
Katie Hartsock’s “What Killed the Boys They Loved When They Were Young” in Literary Matters
Amit Majmudar’s “The Grail Quest” in America
Sally Thomas’s “Walking After Midnight at Midsummer” in Autumn Sky Poetry
Liv Ross’s “An Encounter with Gentleness” in Amethyst Review
Darlene Young’s “Poem to Be Left Behind” in Wayfare
Carla Sarett’s “Mad Junius” in THE RUSH
Alex Rettie’s “Consequential I” in THE RUSH
Matthew King’s “On Learning that Woodpeckers Don’t Have Shock-Absorbing Skulls” in Rattle
Ani Bachan’s “Ash Wednesday Valentine” in The Rappahannock Review
Greg Huteson’s “Cold Riotous Sea” in Joie de Vivre
A Contemporary Classic
Jane Kenyon’s “Twilight: After Haying”—an excerpt
Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?
The men sprawl near the baler,
reluctant to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)
Thanks for the double mention, Steve! And I agree about Autumn Sky Poetry Daily --- it's a great venue, and I love her system. Quick and painless for all involved.
Thanks also for mentioning the Dana Greene book on Jane Kenyon. I really didn't like her Elizabeth Jennings book, but I'll give the Jane Kenyon a whirl anyway.