The Rusty Paperweight: February '25

New Editors, The American Ecstatic, The Colosseum, AI, an Ancient Alphabet

It’s been a busy start to the new year at NVR. In January, we released our winter issue. We also recently released pdf versions of all three issues to date. This past week contributing editor Ethan McGuire edited and introduced a selection of poems in honor of the director David Lynch.

I am also excited to announce some additions to the masthead. Zina Gomez-Liss will join Ethan and Carla Sarett (who has two poems in the Lynch feature) as a contributing editor. If you haven’t seen Zina’s substack The Beauty of Things, be sure to check it out. Zina has some reviews and interviews in the works for NVR, and she is also helping to spread the word on Facebook. Mary Grace Mangano and D.A. Cooper are joining the team as associate editors. They will help review submissions and assemble issues. Zina, Mary Grace, and D.A. are excellent poets and essayists, and I am honored to have them as editors.

Mary Grace and D.A. are currently editing a special mini-issue of New Verse Review showcasing poems by graduates of the MFA program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. (They are both graduates themselves, and Zina is a current student.) The UST program has quickly established itself as one of the very best places to study formal poetry at the graduate level. Its students have burst onto the scene in recent years, and several of them have already contributed to NVR. (I share an announcement below about a new poetry journal affiliated with the UST program.) The mini-issue features some impressive work. You can look for it later in the spring.

Listen Up!

A.M. Juster on Girlatee, Poetry for Kids, and His Own Life in Poetry

At the Votive podcast, Haley Stewart interviews A.M. Juster about his childhood love of poetry and his new children’s book Girlatee. The conversation ranges across reading to children, inherently funny words, the children’s poetry of Richard Wilbur and X.J. Kennedy, and Juster’s “double life” as a poet and civil servant. Juster also reads a few lines from Girlatee.

On the same topic, don’t miss Alfred Nicol’s review of Girlatee, co-written with his five-year-old granddaughter. Here’s her dictated contribution to the review:

It’s about manatees and octupi, fishes, cranky crabs, mummatees, daddytees, and sweetytees. And there were two fishes, and there was a man, and the girlatee got on shore and it was very hot for her, and too sandy, and no water — just too hot for her. The sun was too hot, and three friends helped her, and officers came and helped her into the ocean. And then the rainbow came. And then she swam back to her mom and Dad and they were happy ever after.

A.E. Stallings and Matthew Buckley Smith on Rachel Wetzsteon

I did not know about the impressive and often moving poetry of Rachel Wetzsteon before this episode of the Sleerickets podcast. A.E. Stallings and Matthew Buckley Smith have especially interesting things to say about how this poet of New York City is also a poet of allusion—to John Keats, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and others. In this regard, their conversation about Wetzsteon is a great follow-up listen to Stallings’s Oxford lecture (featured in last month’s Paperweight) on “upping the ante” via allusion.

American Ecstatic

in a recent episode of Poetry Says, Alice Allan discusses what she calls the “American Ecstatic” tradition, which descends from Whitman and combines capacious cataloging and (often too-easy) appeals to divinity. It’s an intriguing listen.

Step Right Up!

Frost Farm Poetry Prize

The 2025 Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry is now accepting submissions. The deadline is March 31. This year’s judge is Maryann Corbett.

The Trustees of the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, N.H., and the Hyla Brook Poets invite submissions for the 15th Annual Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry. The winner receives $1,000 and an invitation, with honorarium, to read at the Hyla Brook Reading Series, August 15, 2025, at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire. The reading opens the three-day Frost Farm Poetry Conference. The winner will receive a scholarship to attend the conference. The winner has the option to have the winning poem published in The Robert Frost Review.

Richard Snyder Memorial Book Prize

Ashland Poetry Press is accepting submissions for its Richard Snyder Memorial Book Prize. May 1 is the deadline, and this year’s judge is Kim Addonizio.

Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award

Plough Quarterly is accepting submissions for its annual Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award. The deadline is April 30, and this year’s judge is Plough’s new poetry editor J.C. Scharl.

Around the Poetry World

Monkeys Typing Shakespeare

Last month I linked to this story about a study claiming that monkeys are not going to type out Shakespeare anytime soon. At the time, I did not know about this witty little poem by Steven Kent, originally published in LIGHT.

New Literary Journal

I was excited to see the recent announcement of a new semi-annual literary journal, The Colosseum, edited by James Matthew Wilson and Michael Yost, and with serious institutional backing from Franciscan University and the University of St. Thomas in Houston. With Wilson and Yost at the helm, you know that this is going to be a great journal for formalist poetry, but Colosseum will also publish fiction, essays, and reviews.

Isa Farfan, “Alphabets Might be 500 Years Older Than We Thought”

Is it an alphabet or something more like cuneiform? Either way, this story in Hyperallergic details an intriguing discovery in Syria:

The symbols carved into the artifacts are distinct from characters associated with cuneiform, according to Schwartz, suggesting a new form of writing entirely. While cuneiform is considered the world’s oldest writing system, having emerged before 3400 BCE in Mesopotamia, it is neither an alphabet nor a language but rather a set of characters denoting syllables.

Schwartz explained that the clay cylinders resemble beads, which could mean they were strung together to function as a tag in the Umm el-Marra tomb.

One symbol carved into the clay is a circle with two dots, which appears on two of the cylinders. That recurrence, Schwartz said, strengthens the case that the symbols are actually alphabetic writing.

AI and Writing

There have been many compelling pieces written about AI and writing in recent months. Here are two particularly insightful ones from friends of NVR. At Front Porch Republic, Nadya Williams reflects on how hard it is to avoid AI “assistance” even for those of us who want to write for ourselves.

As I opened this file to begin writing, the following message greeted me: “Select an icon or press Alt + i to draft with Copilot.” Meanwhile, Gemini is on standby in my email program, offering to help me write missives or suggesting optimal answers to emails (“Sounds great!” “Of course!” “Let me get back to you!”). As for Google searches, the top result for anything one attempts to find now is AI-generated, which gives me a new appreciation for the encyclopedias and dictionaries of all sorts that take up space on our shelves. Recently, a Roman literature scholar I know looked up Cicero’s Brutus, searching for a title of an academic article about it. In response, Google helpfully invented a new Roman tragedy on the subject: “Brutus is a serious Roman historical drama, or fabula praetexta.” Another academic friend is contemplating breaking her contract with an academic press that is newly allowing AI to be trained on the content of its books.

And here is Amit Majmudar at Athenaeum Review on “AI and the Futures of Literature” (note the plural of futures):

Notice how I referred to my own background as a radiologist in an essay ostensibly about AI and literature; notice, too, the self-reflexiveness of this passage, indicating self-consciousness, and hence, indirectly, consciousness itself. You see these tendencies everywhere of late. It is the fons et origo of the recent genre of “creative nonfiction.” I sprinkled that random Latin phrase in there because it isn’t very typical of AI’s offerings. All of this is me trying to convince you that you’re getting something in this essay that you can’t get by typing “What potential effects will AI have on literature?” into ChatGPT.

I was especially intrigued by Majmudar’s thoughts on how AI would affect not just writers but audiences.

Poems Ancient and Modern

Poems Ancient and Modern recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. If you don’t subscribe to this substack publication, you really should. Each day the editors Joseph Bottum and Sally Thomas share a poem and some brief commentary. Most of the poems are classics (recognized or underappreciated) in the public domain, which means you get to learn about a lot of older poetry. It’s a real—and rewarding—education to read.

Last month I noted how Poems Ancient and Modern has drawn attention to once famous but now neglected work by the Fireside Poets. It has also featured poems from the Harlem Renaissance that deserve to be better known. Here’s Thomas on Countee Cullen’s “Saturday’s Child,” and here she is on Anne Spencer’s “Life-long, Poor Browning.” Thomas and Bottum were kind enough to run my post on Claude McKay’s “The Tropics in New York.”

Victoria Moul, “The Fields of Flanders: Rondeaux as the Poetry of War”

At her Horace & Friends substack, the always insightful Victoria Moul writes about the rondeau form and its variations. She begins by wondering why rondeaux are not written more often in English.

The simpler, more everyday kinds of rondeau, however, ought not really to be much more challenging in English than a sonnet, a form which has of course been enthusiastically domesticated. The most common form of rondeau has three stanzas of five, four and six lines, with the first half of line one being repeated as an abbreviated half line at the end of the second and third stanzas.

She goes on to discuss John McCrae’s classic Remembrance Day rondeau “In Flanders’ Fields,” a war rondeau parfait by D.H. Lawrence, and other examples of rondeaux and near-rondeaux by Thomas Hardy and Swinburne.

Ted Kooser on the Charm of Poetry:

Here’s a recent brief newspaper interview with Ted Kooser. He lists some of his favorite painters, “classic country” musicians, and contemporary poets, including NVR contributor Jared Carter. Kooser also talks about the “charm” of poetry:

For me a good poem has to have charm. That is, charm in the deeper sense of that word — magic. Charm can take many forms, can be in the music of the poem, the imagery, the metaphors, but without any charm a poem falls flat.

The Thing Itself

Don’t miss the newly released “Southern Summer” issue of the Australian poetry journal The Borough edited by Clarence Caddell. It is chock-full of good poems from R.L. Barth, Susan Delaney Spear, D.A. Cooper, Juleigh Howard-Hobson, Steven Searcy, Megan Cartwright, and others.

Ernest Hilbert’s “The First of February” in Cassandra Voices

Robert W. Crawford’s “The Hum of Light” in Plough

Julia Nemirovskaya’s “Winter” translated by Boris Dralyuk in Plough

Tim Seibles’s “Runaway Blues Villanelle” in Nimrod

Zina Gomez-Liss’s “Transition Age” in Autumn Sky Poetry

Mary Grace Mangano’s “Year of the Rabbit” in Ekstasis

Isabella Hsu’s “Dad Recites the Full Moon” in Ekstasis

Jared Carter’s “Waterfall” in Pulsebeat

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah’s “My Father’s Last Sentence” in Pulsebeat

Barbara Lydecker Crane’s “Sirens” in Pulsebeat

Laura Wang’s “Elegy for the Kahala Mall Barnes & Noble” in Pulsebeat

Ted Kooser’s “A Winter Dinner” in Literary Matters

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s “My Mother’s Teeth” in First Things

A.M. Juster’s “Epistle to a Former Friend” in First Things

Marly Youmans’s “St. Gobnait of the Honeybees” in First Things

Christopher Hewitt’s “Flameworking” in The New Criterion

Sarah Burke Cahalan’s “Before and afterlife,” winner of Poems for Persons of Interest Poems of Hope contest

Carla Sarett’s “Ajar,” a finalist in Poems for Persons of Interest Poems of Hope contest

Contemporary Classic

Marilyn Nelson’s “Miracle in the Collection Plate” via Poets.org

Rev. Christopher Rush, 1850

Brothers and sisters, we know why we’re here
this evening. The sad news has traveled fast
of Brother James’s capture. For three years
he lived amongst us, tasting happiness.

His wife and child are here with us tonight.
God bless you, Sister. Without a goodbye,
James was handcuffed, and shoved on a steamboat
to Baltimore, to be sold—legally!

Neighbors, we know that upright, decent man:
James Hamlet: a loving husband, father, friend.
Many of us would gladly risk the fine
or prison sentence, if we could help him.

My friends, all is not lost! It’s not too late!
We are told that Brother James may be redeemed!
His buyer will sell him! But we cannot wait:
we need eight hundred dollars to free him.

Eight hundred. I know every penny counts,
living from widow’s mite to widow’s mite.
But with God’s help, we can raise that enormous amount!
Let’s make a miracle in the collection plate!