The Rusty Paperweight: January 2024

Upping the Poetic Ante, from Prufrock to the Pogues, Typing Monkeys

As the Christmas season draws to a close, NVR’s editorial elves are putting the ribbons on a belated present for you. In a couple of weeks, we will release our second full-length issue: Winter 2025. You can preview the cover and the contributor list here.

In the meantime, enjoy the links!

Listen Up!

Think/NVR Online Reading

If you missed November’s online reading co-hosted by Think Journal and New Verse Review (or if you want to relive its glory), you can check out the recording below. The featured readers are Daniel Cowper, Claudia Gary, Katie Hartsock, George David Clark, Katherine Gordon, and Timothy Kleiser. Many thanks to Erica Reid,assistant editor at Think, for orgainzing the event and for inviting NVR to participate. (Don’t miss Erica’s New Year poem, linked below.)

A.E. Stallings, “Upping the Ante: How Word Choice, Quotation and Allusion in Poems Raise the Stakes”

All four of A.E. Stallings’ Oxford poetry lectures have been excellent so far. The most recent one, though, may be the best yet, especially if you want to learn the poetic craft. Stallings talks about how poets can “up the ante,” especially via a risky classical or biblical allusion. Along the way, she offers brisk and insightful readings of poems by Robert Frost, Robert Francis, Elizabeth Bishop, John Keats, and others.

Rhina Espaillat, Alfred Nicol, and Al Basile on Favorites

Don’t miss Rhina Espaillat, Alfred Nicol, and Al Basile reading and discussing their favorite poems on Basile’s “Poems On” series. Simply wonderful!

Back of the Book with Sally Thomas

Sally Thomas recently appeared on Back of the Book, a new podcast hosted by Christopher Scalia. It’s an enjoyable and edifying conversation that ranges across her poetry and fiction. Thomas reads and discusses three poems, including “Aubade with Grackle,” which was the first poem in NVR’s first issue. I was touched that she chose to discuss it here.

Ten Great Poems

Elijah Perseus Blumov gives us a quick tour of ten of his favorite short poems in this recent episode of the Versecraft podcast. Three of my own favorites are among them: Jean Toomer’s “November Cotton Flower,” W. H. Auden’s “The Fall of Rome,” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.” The episode also introduced me to some poems I am glad to know, including “On Being Human” by C.S. Lewis and “Orthodox Christmas Eve” by Gail White (featured below).

From Prufrock to the Pogues

The Christmas season lasts through Epiphany, and here is the perfect podcast for it. Phil Klay and Jake Siegel of the Manifesto! podcast discuss Thomas Hardy’s “The Oxen,” T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” and, in a satisfying twist, The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.”

Step Right Up!

Rattle Chapbook Competition/Submissions Due January 15

This has to the be king of chapbook contests, organized by the good folks at Rattle. Three winners will each receive $5,000, 500 copies of their chapbook, and distribution to Rattle’s 8,000 subscribers. Get your submission in by midnight on January 15, 2025. The submission guidelines are exceedingly writer-friendly. You can find them here.

Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry

Nimrod Internatonal Journal is accepting submissions for its annual Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Randall Mann is the guest judge. The winner receives $2,000 and publication in one of the best literary magazines out there. Full guidelines here.

Around the Poetry World

Hannah Ritchie, “Monkeys will never type Shakespeare, study finds”

Whew. That’s a relief.

Get In Your Reading Reps!

If you are still looking for a worthy New Year’s resolution, consider adopting Matthew Walther’s “hundred pages strategy”: “every day, come rain or shine, on religious and secular holidays, when I travel and when I am exceptionally busy, I read at least one hundred printed pages.” Cranky and encouraging by turns, Walther provides some tips in the latest issue of The Lamp:

It should go without saying that one must never go anywhere without bringing a book. Almost no one thinks twice about the purported wisdom of never leaving the house without a mobile phone—what if there were an emergency?—even though the actual odds of absolutely needing to make a call or send a text message during an unremarkable two-hour span on a Sunday afternoon are vanishingly small. The best way of making it at least somewhat likelier that we read a few pages when we are out and about is to have a book already at hand, especially one we have already started and are getting on with. I cannot count the number of cumulative hours I have spent reading while watching my children play at parks.

Some NVR readers might take issue with how he counts poetry:

There is really no satisfactory answer to the question of how reading poetry fits into the hundred pages strategy. If one is reading a Shakespeare play or a long narrative poem, it seems to me reasonable to count pages in the ordinary way—there are fewer words, but each one is more significant. In the case of a volume of lyric poems opened at random, this seems more dubious.

Poems Ancient and Modern

If read at all, the Fireside Poets of the nineteenth century have largely been relegated to children’s poetry. At Poems Ancient and Modern, Sally Thomas and Joseph Bottum have oftened encouraged readers to take a second look at these once-popular poets. Bottum continued this noble work recently by featuring John Greenleaf Whittier’s long poem Snow-Bound:

But the social argument of the poem is worth noticing, as well — not just the nostalgia that was a kind of wound-binding for the injured nation. Snow-Bound also makes an interesting claim about the dangers of nature and the dangers of our fellow man. The deadliness of the snow outside is matched by an implied peril indoors. And what keeps us from one another’s throats are — Whittier suggests — the acts of reading aloud and telling stories. The sociality of narrative art overcomes cabin fever (as instanced in the poem itself). We do not go mad in the darkness of winter, murderous in the forced irritation of cramped spaces, because we step outside ourselves as we listen to books read aloud and stories told of the youth of the older generations.

Kurp on Greer

At his blog Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp offers a short but insightful appreciation of Jane Greer’s poetry:

Greer reminds me on occasion of Janet Lewis. Both might be described as “domestic” poets. They often write about homebound objects and events, like gardening and family, though that describes only the most superficial aspect of their poems, the “content.” Neither is a composer of “messages.” Their poems are made to be heard. They are constructions of sound.

Virginia Poet Laureate

I am pleased to share that Mattie Quesenberry Smith, my colleague and an NVR contributor, is the new poet laureate of Virginia. Mattie graduated from the legendary writing program at Hollins, where she studied with Roseanne Coggeshall, Rick Tretheway, and R.H.W. Dillard. She grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia, and many of her poems are rooted in the Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge Moutains:

Smith often gets inspiration for poetry from nature. She is particularly drawn to metamorphosis, a change of physical form like that of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, and fractals, geometric shapes with complex, repeating patterns, like seashells. She also collects things that stir her, like rocks. “And then there are things that haunt me that I write around. Once when my husband was outside raking leaves, he uncovered remnants of toys our children had played with when they were young. He brought them in and placed them on a windowsill. Seeing those little leavings was very emotional to me, and I wrote a collection of poems about them called, “Leaving October.”

A Contemporary Aristophanes

In late 2023, A.M. Juster published a verse translation-and-riff on Aristophanes’ comedy Gerytades, which survives only in fragmentary form. Here is an earlier essay by Juster in Antigone that discusses how he came to work on Gerytades, but it is also a fascinating and wide-ranging piece of memoir:

I have loved poetry since I was young. When I was about three, my mother would take me to the front yard under our big tree and read poems to me, mostly Dr. Seuss and A.A. Milne. When I was eight, I won a school Arbor Day poetry contest and my entry appeared in our small-town newspaper. My teacher buried that poem in a time capsule in the roots of a newly-planted tree beside the school parking lot, and I still have nightmares that it will be discovered someday.

The Thing Itself

Jesse Keith Butler’s “Continuing City”—1st place, English Speaking-Union Formal Verse Contest (scroll down to access his poem)

Marly Youmans’ “Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work”—Runner-Up and President’s Choice Award, ESU Formal Verse Contest (scroll down to access her poem)

Kevin Hart’s “Learning Greek”—Runner-Up, ESU Formal Verse Contest (scroll down to access his poem)

Edward Alport’s “The Dry Bones” in Amethyst Review

Jane Blanchard’s “Jacob Marley” in The Ekphrastic Review

Erica Reid’s “It’s Me Again” in Rattle

Dante Di Stefano’s “We Three Kings” in Rattle

A.E. Stallings’ “Ragged Claws” in The Times Literary Supplement

Midge Goldberg’s “Words My Mother Didn’t Know” in LIGHT

Amit Majmudar’s “Apophatic” in First Things

Amit Majmudar’s “Castrati” in Trampoline (scroll down to access his poem)

Daniel Fitzpatrick’s “Good News” in Trampoline (scroll down to access his poem)

A. A. Gunther’s “For Your Penance” in Merion West

Claudia Gary’s “Kitchen Talk” in ONE ART

Shamik Bannerjee, “Cricket with Father” in Pulsebeat

Joan Mazza’s “It is what it is” in Pulsebeat

J. C. Scharl’s “Sestina for Mother” in Fare Forward

Maryann Corbett, “Nothing like the sun…” in The National Poetry Review

Contemporary Classic

Gail White, “An Orthodox Christmas” via PoemTree (and as mentioned in Versecraft)

What am I doing here with all these Greeks?
Hoping, perhaps, at midnight Christmas Eve,
The unintelligible tongue God speaks
Will summon even those who don't believe
To Mary's manger.  Now the Virgin bears
The Master in the cave.  As light through glass
He passes from her body.  Joseph dares
Believe the story; I can let it pass.
The incense rises like the church's breath
Into a frosty world.  This night of birth
Swells to a tide that tosses me past death.
But tides recede—I know this moment's worth.
If love of beauty were the same as faith,
I'd walk in heaven with my feet on earth.