The Rusty Paperweight: April '25

Curated by Contributing Editor Ethan McGuire

Blows the thaw-wind pleasantly,
Drips the soaking rain,
By fits looks down the waking sun:
Young grass springs on the plain.

(From "Spring" by Christina Rossetti)

Ah, sweet spring! Though the “thaw-winds” are not always so pleasant here in Northern Indiana and around the Great Lakes in general. Spring is birthed painfully here, it seems. The wind blows hard across the plains, and as we grimace against it (or chase a wayward garbage can!) the only consolation is the end of winter.

Though even the end of winter seemed too far away too long this year! I mean, heck, we had some snow flurries here last week. Unacceptable.

Anyway, regardless of the weather, Easter is upon us. We are in the middle of Holy Week. And budding trees speak to renewal, rejuvenation, rebirth.

I have been a bit behind on a lot of projects, including (sorry Steve!) this Rusty Paperweight, while my first book, Apocalypse Dance, launched and, unfortunately, as everyone in my family came down sick. Even so, I have done what I can to keep track of the latest in our little corner, the poetry world, some of which I will try to represent in this latest roundup of links, etc.

We certainly had a good few weeks here at NVR, not least because of the continued follow-up to Elijah Blumov’s fiery “Iron Lyre” essay, Sleerickets’ questioning of Elijah on the piece, Alice Allan’s deeply personal response "On Fear," and Elijah’s clarification of his intent in his “Monumentalist Manifesto”. A wonderful, welcome dialogue, which was also carried out on social media and in the NVR Substack comments! New Verse Review’s 2025 has started strong, and, as is appropriate for the season, we are looking forward to great growth here in the coming months. We have many good things planned, so keep your eyes on us!

There is no time like Spring,
When life's alive in everything.

Kindred Spirits

Alice Allan

Speaking of Alice Allan, it is bittersweet for me to say that her wonderful podcast, Poetry Says, has come to an end. But! There are still so many charming episodes there for people to discover and enjoy, and Alice is on to other projects. She is a writer after all, an excellent poet, and I hope she will have more time to focus on that now, just as she did with her NVR piece, “On Fear,” and another essay at Tar River Poetry, “Better: On the Delusions of Writing Advice.” Read those, and connect with her at her Substack.

J.S. Absher

On his own blog, J.S. Absher has reviewed New Verse Review, saying many kind things about us and highlighting the recent Winter issue. His review “is personal, from the standpoint of a practicing writer and reader of poetry with a growing attachment to formal poetry,” and he digs a little deeper still into poems from the issue by Ernest Hilbert, Robert W. Crawford, Jean L. Kreiling, Barbara Lydecker Crane, Sydney Lea, Amit Majmudar, Alice Allan, Steven Searcy, Alfred Nicol, Jared Carter, and Christopher Childers. We sincerely appreciate it and recommend the piece and the blog to you.

Tang Poetry

Another recent discovery of mine in “NVR kindred spirits” is Phil H.’s Substack Tang Poetry. I found it while searching for a good translation of Wang Wei’s Wang River Collection and subscribed not long after. On the “About” page, Phil says, “I translate Tang poetry because it’s one of the world’s great literatures, but it’s criminally under-represented in English. Most poems have never been translated. . . My particular angle is that I translate Tang poems into English verse. Tang poetry rhymes and scans, but the vast majority of translations into English don’t, and something is lost along the way.” You can see why I would call this a kindred spirit to NVR!

Poems for Persons of Interest

Alex Rettie’s always fun Poems for Persons of Interest has a new issue out, a 2025 Easter Bouquet of Poems which we recommend! It includes poems by Frances Boyle, Bethel McGrew, Sally Thomas, Jeffrey Rensch, Oluwaseyi Daniel Busari, Grant Shimmin, William Orbih, Sarah Adeyemo, Nas Jolaade, Titilayo Matiku, and Tamarah Rockwood. Here are a few lines from Bethel’s “Dream of the Old City”:

In waking dreams, I walk the Way of Sorrows
Between my yesterdays and my tomorrows.
I smell the market, watch the children leaping,
And still I hear a hundred daughters weeping.
A soldier walks behind you, flagrum swinging.
You sway and stumble blindly, sweat drops stinging.

Wiseblood Books

Wiseblood Books, which I am always closely watching, has a beautifully assembled new series out: The Living Fire: Contemporary Catholic Writers for the Classroom. Currently, the series contains three books: a Selected Works containing two curated sets of poems from the living Catholic writers Sarah Cortez and Dana Gioia and two instructional unit plans. The instructional unit plans include “suggested activities, writing prompts, vocabulary for scaffolding reading comprehension, challenges for advanced and ESL students, activities that appeal to different learning styles, and critical thinking discussion questions with suggested responses and considerations.” The focus of this new series is to “offer students and teachers a chance to discover—or rediscover—the enchanting, incarnational joy of poetry.”

The Joie de Vivre Louisiana Arts & Culture Festival

Daniel Fitzpatricks’s Joie de Vivre is hosting their 1st Annual Louisiana Arts & Culture Festival on May 16-17 at Saint Joseph Abbey & Seminary College in Saint Benedict, Louisiana. Register at the JDV website. If I could I would be attending this, because it looks amazing. The featured speakers are Timothy Gautreaux, Katy Carl, James Matthew Wilson, and Jane Scharl. “This two-day gathering focused on ‘South Louisiana & Literature’ will bring together local and national novelists, short story writers, poets, and artists with our wider community to celebrate the feast that is our Catholic faith and the literary and visual arts.”

Listen Up!

Descend with Ascend

Ascend: The Great Books Podcast has put their current series on the great Greek plays on hold in order to release a short series over Lent on Dante, specifically his Inferno. Though I am usually unforgiving toward people who teach Dante but stop at Inferno, for this case I will make an exception. The hosts of Ascend are careful Catholic and catholic readers who will help you read through and think through the book, whether you are new or old to it. Their most recent episode, from April 15th, is on Cantos 32-34. They have had some good guests for this Inferno series as well, including Jeremy Holmes, Jennifer Frey, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Jason Baxter, Fr. Thomas Esposito, Donald Prudio, Evan Amato, and more.

John Berryman Addresses the Lord

S.P. Cooper and D.N. Keane’s podcast Critical Readings recently released an episode on John Berryman and his “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” that impressed me. On one hand, I cannot call Berryman a favorite poet of mine; I dislike too much of his work to do so. On the other hand, I do love his Dream Songs very much, as well as several of his sonnets (which Alex Priou’s essay “The Myth of the Liar Poet” helped illuminate for me), and other assorted poems, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” being one of those. Cooper and Keane consider the work “within the context of the author’s biography and Judeo-Christian theology, with special emphasis on the distinction between God as abstraction and as embodied being.”

Robert Bernard Hass Recalls the Horses of Achilles

Robert Bernard Hass is one of the very best formalist poets writing today and just as excellent at reading his poems in public (rare!). I had the pleasure of hearing him recite his wonderful “Ariel” last year. Listen to him recite “The Horses of Achilles” and see what I mean!

Amit Majmudar, the Prolific Radiologist Poet

Amit Majmudar is my favorite living poet, but I am not really able to get anywhere close to keeping up with everything he does, because he is so prolific! And he has a full-time job as a doctor (a radiologist) and he has a whole family and he is a practicing religious man and he seems to be traveling all the time all over the world! If I had but an ounce of his energy what I could do! He recently appeared on the Inside the Reading Room podcast, in their “Unconventional Radiologist” series, to talk about “the unexpected connections between radiology and poetry, the power of storytelling in medicine, and how creativity can thrive even in the busiest of lives.”

The New Thinkery Thinks About Pindar

I mentioned Alex Priou earlier, and he has a podcast that he hosts alongside his friends Greg McBrayer and David Bahr where they usually discuss political philosophy but also regularly explore other kinds of philosophy as well as literature and cinema. These guys are serious thinkers and scholars, but they use the podcast to teach deeply in a way that is friendly, fun, and funny, modeling a close kinship and friendship among themselves first and foremost.

Recently, with the help of guest Patrick Callahan, they turned their attention to the poetry of Pindar, to his history and work, to deciphering some of his poems line-by-line, and to walking through how best to understand his work. It is both informative and entertaining. I just hope, now, that they will be able to take a look at Chris Childers great work on Pindar!

Podcasts and Poetry Craft

At Lemon Grove, Megan Nichols considers the novel idea of “Learning Poetry Craft Through Podcasts.” This is where much, if not most, of my poetry education has come as well—from podcasts! The only problem is that she is missing, in her recommendations, the very best podcasts for learning poetry craft: Versecraft, Sleerickets, Poetry Says, The Poetry Space_, and Critical Readings.

Around the Poetry World

Elijah Blumov, “Cracking the Ode: A New Englishing of Pindar,” Literary Matters

. . . If any 21st century poet asserted, with Ovid, that he had written a work which “the corruption of time will not destroy” he would be dismissed as woefully naive. This year, however, Christopher Childers may have produced just such a work. His gargantuan tome of translations, The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, the Hesperidean fruit of fourteen years of labor, is not only magnificent poetry, but, objectively speaking, a herculean, historically significant achievement. For the first time in English, a vast proportion of extant Classical short poetry has appeared in a single book by a single hand, translated into metrical, rhyming verse. . .

Of all the hundreds of poets in such a wide-spanning collection, there is one who would be the obvious white whale for anyone: Pindar (“Don’t even try it!” heckles Horace). No one is so grand, serious, difficult, or formally complex. No one is so thoroughly un-modern. Like Abraham Cowley, Childers delights in the familiar company of Anacreon and Horace; unlike Cowley, he is also, remarkably, able to hold pace with the mighty Olympian. . .

Chris Childers, “A Mockingbird Among Nightingales” Parts 1-3, Callida Iunctura

. . . My idea, as previously mentioned, is that voice in translation is best approached as a problem and product of technique. The first element to consider is poetic ‘form’: by this I mean, in reference to the original, the meter and unit or units of composition (stichs, distichs, strophes), and in the English translation, the use of meter, stanza and rhyme. Second is the way the syntax moves through those units, a consideration which touches on questions of closure and openness, end-stopping and enjambment, and the manipulation of caesuras. Third, we have the general register of diction and tone as dictated by a sort of ‘bird’s eye view’ of the poem and poet and their broad place in the tradition, and an admittedly subjective sense of the kinds of sounds that are most appropriate to this kind of poem. Considered in this way, “form” becomes the first line of defense against monotony; syntax is second; diction and sound are third. . .

Boris Dralyuk interviewed by Chinki Sinha, “Poetry Awakens Us To All That Makes Us Human,” Outlook

. . . Many poets in Ukraine are quite literally fighting on the frontlines, weapons in hand, but poets can also fight through poetry. Their work can remind readers that war is more than a matter of shifting borders and casualty numbers. Every person involved is just that, a person — a person with unique character and a full life. A poem can be, among other things, the crystallisation of a personality. And we need to remain aware that all the people we see fighting and dying, being bombed and tortured, carry within themselves all that makes us human. Poems awaken us to that fact. . .

Zina Gomez-Liss, “How to Kill a Poet,” The Beauty of Things

Killing a poet isn’t all that difficult. There are ways to kill a poet that are just like killing anyone else, but a poet has certain qualities unique to them. First and foremost, they write poems. (Poetry, regardless of quality or form, is the main evidence that are you are dealing with a poet.) Often they are good at paying attention to their environments, and they seem particularly talented at using language to describe the world. Perhaps they may be melancholic to the point of being suicidal. There is such a thing as the Sylvia Plath effect, after all. However, the death I am talking about isn’t so much about corporeal mortality. . .

Daniel Mendelsohn, “From Homer’s ‘Odyssey’,” The New Criterion

. . . With this edition of Homer’s Odyssey, the celebrated author, critic, and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn brings the great epic to vividly poetic new life. Widely known for his essays on classical literature and culture in The New Yorker and many other publications, Mendelsohn gives us a line-for-line rendering of The Odyssey that is both engrossing as poetry and true to its source. Rejecting the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, he artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities—meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance—and in so doing restores to Homer’s masterwork its archaic grandeur. Mendelsohn’s expansive six-beat line, far closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer’s dense verses without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original. . .

. . . Now Helen, offspring of Zeus, had a new thought.
She quickly dropped a drug into the wine they were drinking
Which takes away pain and anger and makes you forget all your troubles.
Whoever drinks it down, once it’s been mixed in a bowl,
Would not shed a tear from his cheeks for the space of one whole day
Not even if his mother or father were lying dead before him,
Not even if people slew his brother or beloved son
With the bronze, and he were to see it with his very own eyes.
Such were the drugs that the daughter of Zeus possessed: full of cunning,
Powerful, the gifts of Polýdamna, consort of Thôn,
A woman of Egypt. For there the grain-bearing land yields more drugs
Than anywhere else: once prepared, many heal—while others are lethal.
There each and every man is a doctor far more skilled
Than all other people, for truly they are the stock of Paiêôn.
After she slipped it in and then ordered the wine to be poured,
She once again took up the thread of the talk and spoke out. . .

Victoria Moul, “The Only Baby in All of Horace,” Horace & Friends

. . . Euripides’ Medea notoriously suggests that she would rather fight in battle three times rather than give birth once. But on the whole the poetic tradition is quite silent on childbirth, its risks and rewards and power to transform. Imagine for a moment a version of the Iliad in which all those epic similes were attached not to deaths and wounding on the battlefield, but to births — all the different ways in which a labour can go wrong, or finally come right.

So I have a soft spot for the only poem by Horace that mentions childbirth — an enigmatic little lyric, Odes 3.22. . .

The Thing Itself

Paul D. Deane, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a translations work-in-progress at Forgotten Ground Regained

Pedro Blas Gonzalez, “Utnapishtim Takes Gilgamesh’s Hand” in VoegelinView

Malcolm Guite, “Maundy Thursday” on his blog

E.J. Hutchinson, “Love Minus Zero,” a translation of an epigram by Henrik Harder, in Ad Fontes

Steve Knepper, “March Morning” in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily

Amit Majmudar, “Unnatural Intelligence” in Colorado Review

Alfred Nicol, “Home Schooling” at Asses of Parnassus

Aaron Poochigian, “Not Atoms,” alongside the Liu Changqing poem (in Aaron’s translation) from Tang Dynasty China that inspired it, at Form in Formless Times

Carla Sarett, “I am holding this for you: cento” in JAKE

Sally Thomas, “In the Courtyard” in Solum Journal

Christian Wiman, “The Eye” in Plough

James Matthew Wilson, Psalms Set for Use as Hymns, in Dappled Things

Contemporary Classics

I will keep the introductory notes to this section brief. When Steve and I (and others to come) place a poem in this “Contemporary Classics” section, without a doubt, we are being bold. We could go on and on, explaining, justifying. But it is of no use, unless you, the reader, read the poem and love it, find pleasure in it. So here is a poem I love and think worthy of this recurring section: “Egg and Dart” by Matthew Buckley Smith.

Elijah Blumov discusses this poem (and the book it comes from, Midlife) at length in his Literary Matters review: “The Poet Laureate of Crushed Dreams: Midlife and the Artistry of Matthew Buckley Smith.” There, Elijah introduces this dramatic monologue with “Repetition itself becomes a theme in what I believe is a strong candidate for Smith’s greatest poem to date, a dramatic monologue entitled ‘Egg and Dart.’ Here, Smith speaks in the voice of an aging Renaissance-era stone carver who specializes exclusively in producing the often overlooked ‘egg and dart’ pattern of trim in Classical architecture.”

Here is “Egg and Dart” as it appears in Midlife (it originally appeared in Able Muse). It is a long poem, but I want to represent it in full, and so I have made it the very last thing in this month’s Rusty Paperweight. Enjoy. And thank you for reading New Verse Review!

“Egg and Dart”

Matthew Buckley Smith

for R.

Here in the studio, everything has its place
And every man his tools and given task.
I am the one that makes the egg-and-dart.
Outsiders seldom recognize the term:
It names the trim on certain walls and columns,
Sometimes around the edge of a relief,
That alternates an oval with a bar
Forever in a perfect marble band
The excellence of which is not being seen.
You have not seen it many times before.
Next time, perhaps, you will not think of me,
The nobody who gives this nothing shape,
The oldest in our studio by far,
Apart from the old master—just my senior,
As in the first days, by a few short years,
The length of an apprenticeship for most.

The master’s own apprenticeship concluded,
Perhaps too early, with a masterpiece:
A seraph in a doorway gazing on
A child Madonna shrouded like a crone,
Her misery suspended by the word
The angel brings of joy soon to be born,
And soon thereafter fixed upon a cross.
The scene was carved from one seamless pink slab,
The maker hardly older than the maid.
It is a wonder. Go sometime and see.

Four decades since have not produced the like.
Such is my master’s failure, justly grand,
As mine is justly slight enough to keep
Within the margins where I’ve made a life
Of egg-and-dart-and-egg-and-dart-and-egg.
Sometimes a serif or a curlicue
Alters the line, a blossom now and then,
Brief variations on a constant theme.
I make the new boys practice till they weep.
For them I’m yet no different than the master,
Another beard, another marble hand.
The older ones know better. Egg-and-dart
They loathe, and gladly shirk, and cannot think
Of anything but being soon beyond it.
They make good sport of me: the Knave of Darts,
Methuselah, the Master’s Wife, his Mother.
Each cohort think their cleverness the first.

Some have, it’s true, known something of success.
A few have set up workshops of their own,
Contending for commissions now with us—
Dull, churchy tableaux mostly, gaudy stuff
Fit only for the pious and the rich.
Not one of them has yet achieved a piece
Like that with which our master made his name,
And none could ever chisel egg-and-dart
More than a pace or two, and those two false,
The darts strung loose, no pair of eggs the same.
Though some lacked cunning, most lacked only care,
And even when I made them watch my hands
Shaping a path across the element,
None of them saw the Knave of Darts himself.
If any had, he might have seen a man
At home within the shadow of a man,
Content to turn out faultlessly his craft
For children’s pay and incidental thanks.
No wonder they looked elsewhere for their dreams.

My own, of late, touch on the blessed Virgin,
Mantled in pink, just as our master made her,
The day he drew the rubble from her face
And found her flushed with motherly despair,
Compelled to carry what she might not keep.
I pray that she will guide the master’s hand
One final time, for one last worthy form,
A miracle to warm his dying fame,
A garment of which I might take the hem.

This morning, though, no mysteries are revealed.
Fleeing an endless luncheon with the count
To play a prince among apprentices,
Our master has declared, perhaps in jest,
That egg and dart are meant to signify
The figures of a Woman and a Man,
Begetting undistinguished generations
One undistinguished coupling at a time.
An older boy, restless to show his wit,
Suggests that Egg and Dart are Eye and Tongue,
Perceptive and appetitive in turn,
Enshackled by their mutual disdain.
The quips and quibbles patter on and on,
And not a word I haven't heard before.

Now we will lose the working day to talk
Of women’s tongues and men’s relentless eyes.
Wine will be brought, a boy will play guitar.
No one will think to ask me what I think.
For forty years I’ve cut the egg, the dart.
I’ve never known a woman or a man
As I have them, not my own eyes and tongue.
I know what they are. I know what they’re not.
If asked I'd say they are nothing less than stone.