The Rusty Paperweight: June 2025

NVR's Birthday, Houston Reading, State Laureates, Sad Poets at Parties

NVR is one year old! It’s been exactly one year since the first Rusty Paperweight. Since then, NVR has published four issues of its poetry journal, a popular David Lynch feature, over thirty book reviews, and much more! It’s been gratifying to see NVR grow at a steady clip. Many, many thanks to you, NVR readers, and to all of the contributors and supporters. Many thanks, too, to my wonderful editorial team.

As NVR enters its second year, we have some exciting new projects on the horizon. First and foremost, we are now accepting submissions for our summer issue, which will be out this July. Note that we are now using the submission manager Duosuma rather than email submissions. Second, starting this month, Daniel Cowper joins the masthead as a contributing editor. He will publish a monthly(ish) column titled “Letters from an Island.” That title is a nod to Yeats, but it is also literally true—Daniel lives with his wife and fellow poet Emily Osborne and their children on an island off the western coast of Canada. Third, we have a series of four essays forthcoming on metrical poetry. We’ll kick off with a reprint of a classic essay by J.V. Cunningham (courtesy of Wiseblood Books’ recently published Complete Essays volume), followed by essays by Brian Brodeur, Susan Delaney Spear, and yours truly. Fourth, if all goes as planned, we will run our first poetry contest later this summer. It will be an award for narrative poems and dramatic monologues. More details soon. Finally, I’m pleased to announce that the Halloween issue will return this fall, so polish up your spectral sonnets and ghostly ghazals for a September submission window.

NVR IRL

Special Issue Launch at the University of St. Thomas Summer Literary Series

If you are in the Houston area, you can enjoy a great lineup of readings and talks from June 9-18 at the University of St. Thomas, including a launch event for NVR’s recent “Poets of the University of St. Thomas” special issue. Come meet a bunch of NVR editors, contributors, and readers in real life!

Kindred Spirits

Alabama Literary Review

The Alabama Literary Review recently released its 2024 edition. It’s chock-full of memorable poetry, fiction, reviews, and essays. Contributors include James Matthew Wilson, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, David Middleton, Jane Blanchard, Morri Creech, Catherine Savage Brosman, Steven Peterson, and many others. ALR is one of the best journals for formal poetry out there, and it has been so for a while now. So if you haven’t enjoyed it before, peruse this issue and then check out the online archives.

Nimrod

You won’t want to miss the summer issue of Nimrod. This is the second issue under the editorship of Boris Dralyuk, and it is stacked with poems by Dana Gioia, Jane Greer, Jenna Le, Daniel Patrick Sheehan, Maryann Corbett, M.I. Devine, Fady Joudah, and others. Nimrod also has a Substack newsletter.

Listen Up!

“Fitzgerald Strikes Back: Rothman’s Rebuttal”

Last month, I recommended Elijah Blumov’s Versecraft episode about Susan Delaney Spears and David Rothman’s textbook Learning the Secrets of English Verse. Blumov had high praise for the book, but he had reservations about the “Robert Fitzgerald” scansion system that it uses. In this new episode, Blumov reads a cordial letter by Rothman (who studied with Fitzgerald at Harvard) defending the merits of the Fitzgerald system. As Blumov notes, this one will probably interest only the meter nerds, but they will find it riveting.

The Laureate Project

Hats off to Matt Hoisch for this wonderful series of brief interviews with current and recent state poet laureates. I am still working through them, but three favorites so far are Virginia’s Mattie Quesenberry Smith, Indiana’s Curtis L. Crisler, and Iowa’s Vince Gotera.

"Repetition Is a Form of Change: An Oblique Strategy in Poetry”

A.E. Stallings continues her virtuoso lecture series as Oxford Professor of Poetry. The most recent lecture focuses on repetition. Stallings ranges across villanelles, triolets, and blues forms. She reads and analyzes poems from William Jay Smith, Theodore Roethke, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wendy Cope, Joshua Mehigan, Elizabeth Bishop, R.S. Gwynn, Langston Hughes, Natasha Tretheway, Mark Strand, and others. At the very beginning of the lecture, Stallings makes some interesting remarks about surprising affinities between avant garde and formalist poetry. Maybe the topic of a future lecture?

The Epic, Sacramental Poetry of David Jones

Jane Scharl recently joined the gentlemen of the Color of Dust podcast to discuss the Welsh World War I veteran, visual artist, and poet David Jones. They range widely but their main focus is Jones’ second book-length epic, The Anathemata. If you are especially interested in that work, I’d recommend starting at the 50:00 minute mark, where Scharl provides an overview of this difficult modernist poem and several insightful “keys” for reading it. But then go back and listen to the whole episode for more on Jones’s life, a reading and discussion of his short poem “A, a, a Domine Deus,” and thoughts about art in the age of AI.

Robert Pinsky’s Retirement Reading

Robert Pinsky recently retired from Boston University. (See the article in the next section of this Rusty Paperweight.) Here is the link to his retirement reading:

Around the Poetry World

Zina Gomez-Liss, “Memorize a Poem in Minutes”

Summer is a good time to get your kids or grandkids, your nieces or nephews, to memorize a poem. Heck, it’s a good time for YOU to memorize a poem. At her Substack The Beauty of Things, Zina Gomez-Liss provides some helpful memorization tips and a selection of “starter” poems for memorization.

I was lousy at tests that required memorizing facts. I would constantly forget why I walked into a room. I’d misplace everything. I couldn’t even remember my social security number correctly which caused an enrollment crisis when I was a junior in college. My memory was bad at everything except the things I wanted to forget. For years bad memories haunted me and severely affected my mental health.

The turning point came in 2022 when I went to the Catholic Imagination Conference in Dallas to hear my friend Sally Thomas speak. She was on a panel with Ron Hansen and Phil Klay, and I heard Phil Klay say that he memorized T.S. Eliot’s“The Wasteland” while humping his gear on training exercises when he was in the military.

Poets at Parties

In the Literary Review, Frances Young describes her idea for a book about literature and parties. Here’s the paragraph on poets:

Poets tend not to enjoy parties. W H Auden recalled that when T S Eliot was asked at a party if he was having fun, he replied, ‘Yes, if you see the essential horror of it all.’ ‘My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps/To come and waste their time and ours,’ writes Warlock-Williams in Philip Larkin’s ‘Vers de Société’. ‘Perhaps/You’d care to join us?’ ‘In a pig’s arse, friend,’ the speaker thinks. Why waste an evening holding a glass of ‘washing sherry’, catching ‘the drivel of some bitch/Who’s read nothing but Which’ and ‘Asking that ass about his fool research’? Small talk is usually the problem. Auden, in ‘At the Party’, moans how ‘Unrhymed, unrhythmical, the chatter goes:/Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.’

Robert Pinsky Retires from Boston University

In BU Today, John O’Rourke offers an extended profile of Robert Pinsky (accompanied by several photographs) upon the occasion of the former US Poet Laureate’s retirement from Boston University after a long teaching career.

[Pinsky] says he’s always stressed the importance of listening, which is one of the reasons he has his students listen to one another and listen to poems by masters like William Butler Yeats, Marianne Moore, Baudelaire, and Horace. In short, he encourages his students to read with their ears. For him, poetry is both a vocal and a bodily art.

“Poetry is uniquely and supremely able to get into the audience’s body. The words of the poem come alive, as I imagine saying them or actually say them. It is the most intimate, and in that sense, the most bodily of all the arts. As a teacher, I have tried to demonstrate that and encourage that great fact for the students.”

Every year, Pinsky asks his students to put together a personal anthology of poems. He urges them to type them so that they get the physical experience of seeing and hearing the poems. They’re asked to pull together a mix of historical and contemporary works. It’s meant to serve as a kind of autobiography that increases over the years, but the exercise also affords him some insight into what young poets are reading and the poets they’re drawn to.

He’s been keeping his own anthology for years, continually adding to it. The spiral-bound collection now numbers hundreds of pages and includes poems from Alexander Pope to Ezra Pound.

Morten Høi Jensen, “In the Margins of Time: James Agee and Weldon Kees”

This essay by Morten Høi Jensen, the critical centerpiece of Nimrod’s summer issue, offers a lively profile of James Agee and Weldon Kees and tells the story of their collaboration on “a three-page unsigned review of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets” in 1943.

While the Depression was the central political-historical event of their youth, literary modernism was its artistic correlative. Kees in particular was every inch a man of what his friend Hugh Kenner later called the Pound Era. To some, it made him seem a little old-fashioned. “Weldon,” Alfred Kazin wrote, “was born too late for the literary modernism that flourished in the first decades of this century and became academic business to our generation.” Similarly, as a young Southern writer finding his own voice, Agee had to contend with the twin pillars of American Southern prose at the time: William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. 1929 saw the publication of both The Sound and the Fury and Look Homeward, Angel, novels whose influence was inescapable, even if it was an influence Agee sometimes resented. “I feel as though he had stolen my whole childhood,” he once remarked of Wolfe.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai on Cristina Campo

In 2024, NYRB Classics, may it endure forever, published a selection of essays by the Italian poet, critic, translator, and religious thinker Cristina Campo. I highly recommend it. There are essays on fairy tales, poetry and attention, William Carlos Williams, Borges, and the desert fathers. In a recent issue of The Lamp, Jaspreet Singh Boparai provides an overview of her life and a review of the collection.

Campo was formidably erudite even by the standards of her peers. She translated poems and prose by an eclectic range of writers, including Saint John of the Cross, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil. Her relationship with Weil’s writing is complex. She was enamored of Weil’s piercing intelligence and unpredictable mystical qualities, and learned a great deal from her work. But after two decades of thinking and writing about Weil, and introducing much of her oeuvre to an Italian readership, Campo seems to have fallen out of love with it. Weil famously refused to be baptized by a priest on her deathbed, preferring instead to argue with him about points of doctrine until she finally drove him away. For Campo this was taking contrarianism a little far.

Madeleine Austin on David Middleton

At the University Bookman, Madeleine Austin reviews the accomplished Louisiana poet David Middleton’s recent collection Outside the Gates of Eden.

Middleton shines brightest in his rooted, placed poems—the more particular, the better. These poems represent Middleton in his truest form, as the Shreveport Poet. The concrete, heightened verse of poems like “Town and Country,” “Porches,” “Bringing Home the Cows After Eden,” and “Fairgrounds” flash the brightest glimpses of Eden.

John-Paul Heil, “Aristophanes Fights Sweaty Catholics and Wins”

I would be tempted to include this recent Dappled Things review essay for the title alone. It brings to mind Aristophanes putting a blustering, belching Ignatius J. Reilly in a headlock. But this piece is also an insightful review of A.M. Juster’s Gerytades, a riff on some fragments from that maestro of Athenian comedy.

The poem’s subtitle already lures you in. The original Gerytades was a play written by Ancient Greece’s king of comedy, Aristophanes, since lost to time and now existing only in fragmentary form. Juster uses these bits and pieces to play an extreme game of Mad Libs: using only the few lines that remain and what little we know of the completed version gleaned from descriptions by Aristophanes’ contemporaries, Juster “finishes” Gerytades not as a play but as a mock-epic poem of rhyming couplets, chock-full of gags that are not only legitimately hilarious but also capture the cadence and rhythm of ancient Greek humor for a contemporary non-expert audience (though, of course, classicists will find plenty of obscure little jokes in here to make their hearts sing).

The Thing Itself

Ange Mlinko’s “Sunburn” in Nimrod

Fady Joudah’s “Lizard Shovel Pose” in Nimrod

Alexis Sears’ “After My Mother’s Mother’s Cancer Returns, I Start Praying Every Night” in American Literary Review

Boris Dralyuk’s “The Dybbuk” in The New York Review

Ned Balbo’s “Vesper Bats & Firefly Light” in Birmingham Poetry Review

Marea Gordett’s “In the Silo” in Birmingham Poetry Review

Teakay Tinkham’s “The Boat in My Backyard” in Alabama Literary Review

Stephen Cushman’s “Euclid’s Cuckoo” in Alabama Literary Review

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s “Killing Agamemnon” in Alabama Literary Review

James Matthew Wilson’s “A Showing” in Alabama Literary Review

Susan McLean’s “Magdalene with Skull” in Pulsebeat

Paul Willis’s “The Sound of Underground” in SLANT

Mark B. Hamilton’s “Lost Cave” in SLANT

Sean Sutherland’s “My Heart at Dusk in My Hometown” in SLANT

Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s “Rodeo” in New Ohio Review

Contemporary Classic

An excerpt from Robert Pinsky’s “City Elegies” via the Poetry Foundation:

All day all over the city every person

Wanders a different city, sealed intact

And haunted as the abandoned subway stations

Under the city. Where is my alley doorway?

Stone gable, brick escarpment, cliffs of crystal.

Where is my terraced street above the harbor,

Café and hidden workshop, house of love?

Webbed vault, tiled blackness. Where is my park, the path

Through conifers, my iron bench, a shiver

Of ivy and margin birch above the traffic?

A voice. There is a mountain and a wood

Between us—one wrote, lovesick—Where the late

Hunter and the bird have seen us. Aimless at dusk,

Heart muttering like any derelict,

Or working all morning, violent with will,

Where is my garland of lights? My silver rail?