The Rusty Paperweight: March 2025

Geoffrey Hill, Rita Dove, the Muse, Ithaka, Sabbath Poems

It’s been a cold and snowy winter here in Virginia, but spring has come early in the wider world of poetry. There’s been a full bloom of journal issues and essays. You’ll notice that I link to more poems than usual below. I could have easily linked to twice as many. I hope you enjoy the bouquet.

Kindred Spirits

THINK

The newly released Winter/Spring issue of THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays is a treasure trove, with poems by Stephen Edgar, Midge Goldberg, Anna Lewis, Daniel Cowper, Maya Venters, Timothy Steele, Zara Raab, D.A. Cooper, Lisa McCabe, and others. Elijah Perseus Blumov has a poem and a critical essay on Melville and gnosticism. If you don’t subscribe already, consider doing so. It’s one of the few form-friendly print journals out there, and it is a vibrant one with a rich history. It meant a lot to me when the editors of THINK invited NVR to co-host a reading last fall, and I was grateful that Brian Palmer mentions NVR in this new issue’s editor’s note as one of several signs of renewed “interest in formal poetry.”

Literary Matters

Congratulations to new editor John Matthew Steinhafel on an impressive first issue of Literary Matters. All good things must come to an end, but I am glad that LM is not ending anytime soon. The whole issue is fantastic (and I return to it more than once below), but the poetry section edited by Matthew Buckley Smith and Cameron Clark will be of particular interest to NVR readers.

Listen Up!

Dana Gioia on Craft

Don’t miss this epic three-hour interview with Dana Gioia on writing. I’d summarize it, but it truly defies summary. You just need to watch it.

Critical Readings on Tennyson

The Critical Readings podcast, hosted by Shawn Phillip Cooper and D.N. Keane, has had a number of good poetry episodes recently. Here’s one on Tennyson’s dramatic monologue “Ulysses.” I appreciate how much fun Cooper and Keane have when discussing literature.

A.E. Stallings, “What These Ithakas Mean: Cavafy, Translation, Influence, and Imitation”

A.E. Stallings continues her remarkable lecture series as Oxford Professor of Poetry. This one takes up the poetry of Constantine Cavafy and the surprisingly pervasive influence it has had on poetry in English. Stallings focuses on Cavafy’s “Ithaka” (influenced in part by Tennyson’s “Ulysses”) and his “Days of…” poems. Among the other poets she discusses are Alan Dugan, W.H. Auden, James Merrill, and Marilyn Hacker. Stallings offers careful literary history and incisive close readings but also, as always, insights into craft—the “prosey” language of Cavafy, the challenges of translation.

Sally Thomas Reading

Here’s a recording of Sally Thomas’s recent fiction and poetry reading at Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire. Thomas will read at my home base, Virginia Military Institute, on the evening of April 2. This event is free and open to the public. If you are in the area and interested, send me an email for the details.

Versecraft on Geoffrey Hill

Elijah Perseus Blumov of the Versecraft podcast recently discussed Geoffrey Hill’s sonnet “Lachrimae Antiquae Novae” about a crucifix. As usual, Blumov’s recitation of the poem is superb and his analysis is insightful. Hill’s sonnet gives him allusions ranging from St. Jerome to T.S. Eliot to explore. Fun fact—Blumov dedicates this episode to new NVR contributing editor Zina Gomez-Liss, who sent him a copy of Hill’s collected poems.

Around the Poetry World

Shakespeare Sonnet Uncovered

Dr. Leah Veronese, an Oxford lecturer in early modern literature, has discovered a hand-copied version of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 114 in the Bodleian. It is part of a seventeenth-century poetic miscellany:

What makes this version particularly fascinating is how the poem has been adapted. The sonnet sits among politically charged works, for example banned Christmas carols and satirical poems on the tumultuous events of the early 1640s. In this copy the sonnet has been adapted as a song set to music by the composer Henry Lawes. This copy only includes the text, but the music itself can be found in a book of songs in New York Public Library. The song-setting includes seven additional lines, and changes to the Shakespeare’s original opening and final couplet.

Rita Dove Interview

Caitlin Doyle interviews Rita Dove in the new issue of Literary Matters. The interview focuses on Dove’s recent collection Playlist for the Apocalypse but ranges widely. Here’s a sample:

CD: Continuing a discussion of your approach to teaching, you have taught for many years at the University of Virginia, where you are now Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing. What are some of the most common flaws that you observe in the work of beginning poets, and what are some approaches you take as a teacher to help them improve in those areas? Conversely, what are some qualities that tend to jump out at you when you find yourself excited by the work of a beginning poet?

RD: The most common weakness is not understanding or paying attention to the many ways in which the language itself can shape a scene. They’ll opt for the direct confessional mode while expressing little desire to revisit the initial draft. They regard silence—the white space at the end of a line, the unsaid thought expressed by a dash—as something they can ignore.

The remedy depends upon each student’s particular obsession. I usually try to direct them to published poets who grapple with similar, though not identical, topics. It’s rarely productive to confront a heartbroken student with a poem about the same kind of heartbreak. Tit-for-tat responses can make students feel that the subject has been explored already, so they have no hope of doing any better. I also try to get them to dig into the details of an event, without commenting on the event itself. For instance, I may ask: What color exactly was the lover’s shirt? How many buttons did he fasten? Was it creased from the bed or wrinkle-free? If there was a collar, how did he straighten it? I want them to learn how to find solace, and even inspiration, in the deeper details.

What can excite me in the work of a beginning poet is what I call “the spark,” which isn’t expertise at crafting a line, but rather the frisson of a detail that feels totally new and yet absolutely right—for instance, the image of a sunrise yawning over the horizon.

Lectures and Talks of Geoffrey Hill

Nik Prassas has started a new Substack to publish transcribed lectures and talks by Geoffrey Hill, including Hill’s legendary Oxford Professor of Poetry lectures.

Patricia Behrens on Rachel Wetzsteon

Last month, I recommended an episode of Sleerickets in which Matthew Buckley Smith and A.E. Stallings discuss the poetry of Rachel Wetzsteon. Patricia Behrens has written an insightful and detailed essay on Wetzsteon and her work for the Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project. Here are the opening paragraphs:

I met Rachel Wetzsteon for the first time at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan where she taught a weekly poetry workshop at a long temporary table set up in a kindergarten classroom. Wetzsteon's entrance added a sudden, big presence to the child-scaled room. She was tall, coltish, with thick, unruly auburn hair. She seemed to me on first sight every inch a poet. In memory, she still does.

Wetzsteon published actively for only twenty years, beginning in 1990. Her work was well-regarded from the start. It combines a witty, contemporary voice with a deep respect for poetic tradition and an emotional vulnerability with a highly developed intellect. "In a perfect world," Adam Kirsch has said, "Rachel Wetzsteon would be one of the most popular poets of her generation." Her final book and a few final poems were published posthumously following her death at 42 in December 2009, by suicide.

Victoria Moul on Women Writers and the Muse

Writing at her Substack Horace and Friends, Victoria Moul examines how “women (in particular) describe encounters with the Muse, a kind of supernatural or spiritual experience which often combines a kind of possession with a story about origins — what it was that made the poet a poet.” Her query kicks off with a fiction writer, Hilary Mantel, and then moves on to poets Jo Shapcott, A.E. Stallings, Denise Levertov, Anna Ahkmatova, and Gillian Allnutt.

Jeffrey Bilbro, “‘As I Know By Love’: Wendell Berry’s Another Day”

At Front Porch Republic, Jeff Bilbro situates Wendell Berry’s recent collection of Sabbath poems within the farmer-poet’s life and loves:

As has been true from the earliest Sabbath poems, Berry’s theological convictions always remain near the surface. But he continues to evade cliché by grounding the poems in his place and the creatures whose lives and loves enable him to imagine the Creator’s love. One might think that after forty-four years of writing these Sabbath poems, Berry would run out of things to say. But it seems that as long as the trees continue their silent conversion of light to soil, as long as the sun and the moon endure, as long as he has life and breath, Berry will continue his acts of Sabbath praise.

Robert Charboneau, “Why Use Meter in Poetry?”

This is an intriguing essay on meter (and not only because Robert Charboneau kindly mentions NVR). Charboneau argues that meter, when it is taught at all, is usually taught as Pound’s metronome. What’s been lost is the music of meter, and how that music interacts with other sonic effects in poetry. I have found Timothy Steele to be very helpful on this point. Steele points out that “what good poets do, when they write iambic verse, is to maintain the fluctuating pattern while continually modulating it from within. They stick to the basic form, but realize it in ever-varying ways.” Charboneau draws on T.S. Omond and his concept of “time-measure.” But he also delves into the history of meter with some help from Owen Barfield and Charles Williams. It’s well worth a read. Here’s a sample:

We readily accept that poetry is a unique sort of speech. It is heightened language, ornate and set apart from regular language. Poetry is figured language. It is language whose primary purpose is to figure, to form in the imagination those things that would make reality apparent, clear, and meaningful.

One of the ways that poetry figures language is through sound. The alliterative line, the refrain, the rhyme scheme. There are many kinds of patterns, and poetry uses them, among other reasons, to give pleasure, to reinforce, to impress, to remember.

Meter is the pattern given to the poem as a whole. It is the measure of its lines such that, when reading, one recognizes an underlying regularity which fosters uniformity.

The Thing Itself

Rita Dove’s “Little Song” in Literary Matters

M.I. Devine’s “Chubby Checker” in Literary Matters

Amit Majmudar’s “The Greatest Generation” in Literary Matters

Jenna Le’s “Close Reading of a Favorite Poem by Carl Phillips” in Literary Matters

Shane McCrae’s “A Morning in the World I Leave Behind” in Literary Matters

Stephen Edgar’s “Greenland Shark” in THINK

Timothy Steele’s “Vermont Pastoral” in THINK

Carla Sarett’s “John Ford Series” in Fevers of the Mind

Taylor Franson-Thiel’s “Excommunication” in Exposed Bone

Kelly Scott Franklin’s “Makers’ Marks,” winner of Poems for Persons of Interest alliteration contest

Antonio Machado’s “On the Burial of a Friend,” translated by Kelly Scott Franklin in Nimrod

Midge Goldberg’s “Argument of Periapsis” in Plough

Matthew Buckley Smith’s “Letter to a Middle-Aged Poet” in First Things

Marly Youmans’ “The Cartagena Fair” in The Brazen Head

Paul Deane’s “The Song of David and Abishag” in The Brazen Head

Gail White’s “The Stricken Queens” in The Brazen Head

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

J.S. Absher’s “Mad Poet Passes” in VoegelinView

Michael Yost’s “Vainglory” in VoegelinView

Karen An-hwei Lee’s “Aquinas and the Cosmic Dumpster” in Eskstasis

Hibah Shabkhez’s “Caged Cockatiels” in Pulsebeat

Maryann Corbett’s “Pictures of Ourselves at Twenty-One” in Rattle

Aaron Poochigian’s “Club Escape” in Rattle

Tomas Tranströmer’s “Epilogue,” translated by Bill Coyle in The Hudson Review

Sally Thomas’s “As Though” in Fare Forward

Sally Thomas’s “The End of March” in First Things

Contemporary Classic

Geoffrey Hill’s “Lachrimae Antiquae Novae” via Versecraft

Crucified Lord, so naked to the world,

you live unseen within that nakedness,

consigned by proxy to the judas-kiss

of our devotion, bowed beneath the gold,

with re-enactments, penances foretold:

scentings of love across a wilderness

of retrospection, wild and objectless

longings incarnate in the carnal child.

Beautiful for themselves the icons fade;

the lions and the hermits disappear.

Triumphalism feasts on empty dread,

fulfilling triumphs of the festal year.

We find you wounded by the token spear.

Dominion is swallowed with your blood.