Discover more from New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry
I awoke today and found The frost perched on the town. It hovered in a frozen sky, Then it gobbled summer down.
So says Joni Mitchell in my favorite song of hers, “Urge for Going.” How true her images are right now, up here in northern Indiana. Not to mention the way many of us feel after Tuesday’s U.S. election results.
As we look forward to the Autumn and Winter holidays, the leaves have turned and are falling from the trees, that old, familiar chill is in the air, and nature makes our restless minds remember life, death, rebirth, and rejuvenation.
My name is Ethan McGuire, and Steve has graciously asked me to be the first guest curator for The Rusty Paperweight. By day, I am a healthcare cybersecurity professional, and by night, I am a writer of essays, short fiction, reviews (of music, movies, books, and poetry), song lyrics, and translations (mostly from Classical Chinese into English). Though I am not our beloved Steve, I will do my best to fill his shoes this month.
Before we get to this month’s links and more, I must remind everyone that New Verse Review is currently open for submissions to its Winter issue, to be published in January. Please follow the submission guidelines to send NVR up to five poems in a Word document, e-mailed to submissions@newversereview.com. You have until Monday, November 25th to get your work in, so do not hesitate! NVR is looking for poetry (original or translated) and, as always, pitches of book reviews, essays, and interviews, which you can e-mail to the same address.
All poets are welcome to submit. NVR likes raw and gritty work too—Steve, especially, enjoys gothic poetry. Nothing hateful or gratuitous though. Also, while NVR is open to well-crafted free verse, NVR is particularly interested in lyric and narrative poetry written in meter and/or rhyme.
See the geese in chevron flight All racing on before the snow. They’ve got the urge for going, And they’ve got the wings to go.
Kindred Spirits
Five days from today, on Wednesday, November 13, at 8 PM Eastern Time, THINK Journal and New Verse Review are cohosting an online poetry reading—a super team-up!
The featured readers are George David Clark, Daniel Cowper, Claudia Gary, Katherine Gordon, Timothy Kleiser, and Jennifer Reeser. To attend, register for free.
Two significant awards friendly to formal verse are on my mind today: Plough’s 2025 Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award and Let Go the Goat’s Culture of Life Poetry Award.
The Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award, honoring the achievements of great Dominican-American poet and translator Rhina Polonia Espaillat, is in its fifth year and will be judged, as always, by Plough’s poetry editor, currently Jane Clark Scharl. Scharl will select twenty or so poems, and the Plough editors will decide on a winner plus two finalists from that selection. This award is free to enter for Plough Quarterly subscribers and $7 per poem for non-subscribers. The winner will receive $2,000 and publication in Plough Quarterly, and the two finalists will receive $250 and publication. Poets may submit their work via the Plough form by March 30, 2025.
The first Culture of Life Poetry Award is for poems that relate to or respond to the theme of “a culture of life.” The first round judge is Maya Clubine Venters and the final judge is Jane Greer. The fee to enter is $15 per poem, the deadline is December 15, 2024, and the winner will receive $2,500 and publication at Let Go the Goat. To enter and see further details, visit Let Go the Goat.
A.E. Stallings is the current Oxford Professor of Poetry, and, in addition to the usual lecture series (Stallings’s titled “Poetry with A.E. Stallings”) that the Oxford Professors of Poetry deliver (best exemplified by the legendary lectures of Sir Geoffrey Hill), Stallings has started a series of written musings on contemporary poems: Echolocations: Thoughts on Poems.
The contemporary translator Chris Childers, who just published his both impressively comprehensive and readable The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse (which I am currently loving for its revival of Pindar, an effort Childers discussed in Literary Matters), has started a new Substack called Callida Iunctura (from Horace’s “Ars Poetica”), where Chris is publishing weekly translations of ancient poets, etc., along with occasional literary musings and other poetry.
Listen Up!
“Urge for Going”
Referencing Joni Mitchell’s song in my introduction convinced me to listen to the song again, and I would like to share that pleasure with you. I am not one to advocate for “song lyrics should be considered poems,” but if any popular music lyricist is close it’s Mitchell. Here is Joni herself performing the song:
And here is my favorite version, by Tony Rice:
Also featuring George David Clark
Speaking, above, of a reading featuring George David Clark, Clark was also a featured reader at a reading this summer with Ryan Wilson and Matthew Buckley Smith hosted by Elijah Blumov at Cleveland, Ohio’s Loganberry Books. The readings, and the discussions and open mic afterward, were maybe the best I have witnessed. Luckily, Elijah’s mother recorded most of it, and that video is available on YouTube, in two parts:
The 2024 THINK Critical Path Symposium
THINK just held their 2024 Critical Path Symposium, week before last, and they recorded all of the sessions, which are available to view, for free at the THINK website. I highly recommend checking them out.
In my favorite session, Elijah Blumov presented a paper on Herman Melville: “The Poisoned Well: Melville and Gnosticism.” In this paper, Blumov highlights the ways in which Gnostic philosophies and beliefs influenced and ran through Melville’s work, especially his poetry and Moby-Dick. I have never heard or read anything quite like Blumov’s excellent presentation here, which I enjoyed considering in light of the ways Melville seems to have been at least beginning to critique and examine religion, ways which Dostoevsky and Nietzsche would soon further.
Matthew Buckley Smith: Drunk as a Poet on Payday
Last week, Jason Gray interviewed Matthew Buckley Smith on his fun podcast, Drunk as a Poet on Payday. Smith’s most recent book, Midlife, is, for my money, probably the best new book-length poetry collection of the last several years, and Gray gets him to talk in-depth about it, as well as about Smith’s own terrific podcast, Sleerickets.
Victoria Moul talks George Herbert on BBC Radio
This week, Victoria Moul (who writes the insightful Horace & friends Substack) joined BBC Radio 4 In Our Time to discuss George Herbert. In Our Time is a good show, especially when they have great guests, and Moul is among the best I have heard there.
Around the Poetry World
Cain close reading Jeffers
In Slant Books’ “Close Reading” series, William E. Cain takes a deep dive into Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Fire on the Hills":
Disruption in Nature, a creature capitalizing on it to slaughter others: this has transpired a near-infinite number of times in the past, and it’s occurring even as this poem is being written and read. Jeffers’s message is the recurrence of such scenes endlessly. That’s the hard-hearted truth. . . Heaven, God, Nature: whatever almighty power exists, it could have shown mercy, allowing smaller lives to find safety and refuge. . . Such mercy, however, would not be as pleasing as the destruction that takes place. There’s fire, fright, the predator, the defenseless. It’s good this way, says Jeffers. That’s the reality that in this fierce poem and others like it, he tells us we must face.
“Joni Mitchell, Ballad Metre, and the Holy Grail”
Over at Traces, a new Christian Canadian literary journal, Sarah Emtage has a conversation with the poet-priest Malcom Guite about Guite’s upcoming multi-volume verse retelling of Arthurian legend, the ballad as a poetic form and why Guite has used it to retell the legends of King Arthur and company, and how things like religion, location, music, and history shape Guite’s artistry.
Joshua Hren’s response to Pope Francis
Public Discourse has a response from Joshua Hren (kind founder of Wiseblood Books) to Pope Francis’s recent “letter on the role of literature in formation.” Hren’s response is titled “The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature” and seeks to build and expand upon the original letter.
By educating our sentiments—by wedding feeling and form, appetite and intellect—good literature moves us to love and hate what we ought to love and hate. Demanding but delightful stories and poems can flex the lazy parts of our souls, strengthening our ability to sort between the specious and the precious, to wrestle through the layered, complex admixture of good and evil inclinations and actions as they exist—enfleshed. Literature lends a fullness to our necessary categories, inviting us to recognize, on our knees, those saving truths we’ve not yet found in real life.
A.M. Juster reviews the re-issued Shield of Achilles
Also at Public Discourse, A.M. Juster has a review of Princeton University Press’s new re-issue of W.H. Auden’s 1955 book of poems, The Shield of Achilles, re-issued complete with thoughtful notes and an insightful introduction by Alan Jacobs. Although Juster is grateful for the reissue, for Edward Mendelson’s editorship of the Auden critical editions series in which the book is an entry, and for Jacobs’s scholarship, Juster ultimately remains unconvinced of Jacobs’s view that The Shield of Achilles is “the boldest and most intellectually assured work of [Auden’s] career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged. . . the most unified of all Auden’s collections.”
Juster concludes that The Shield of Achilles illustrates “a few of Auden’s worst tendencies: obscurity, self-indulgence, and indecision about whether to be comic or serious. . . Buy Auden’s Collected Poems, regularly visit his poems from the 1930s, then patiently scour the rest of his work for more gold.”
The mystical rhymes of Kabir
Beltway Poetry Quarterly has published five poems by the 15th century Indian poet Kabir, whose lyrics were eventually anthologized in the Adi Granth, Sikhism’s most sacred book. Here, they are newly translated by Amit Majmudar alongside the transliterated originals, for comparison.
Naomi Kanakia on translation
At her Substack Woman of Letters, Naomi Kanakia writes about the death of Bibek Debroy, an Indian economist and government official who translated the Mahabharata. She considers how Debroy is underrated as a literary translator who has done awfully impressive work in translating the gigantic and difficult Mahabharata (a feat with which Amit Majmudar is currently wrestling), a text which she says is ten times longer than the extant works of Homer, and he did it in only five years. She examines how Debroy did this (an unusually intimate familiarity with Sanskrit), how what he did was new and special (the first truly complete and unabridged English translation of the Mahabharata, or as close as possible, and readable), why he may not be more well known (he was only working in India, not also the UK or America; he was not an academic; and he was associated closely with the Modi government and Hindu nationalism—to which Kanakia is completely opposed, she makes clear).
Then, Kanakia ponders whether perhaps it was actually Debroy’s milieu and his association with the Indian government and Hindu nationalism that gave him the ability to do this—perhaps he would not have been able if he had been a Western-friendly academic. Perhaps it was his anti-Western bent that allowed him to have the best foundation for engaging with these ancient texts. Finally, she asks, “Where are the American Bibek Debroys?” Why does the American system fail to produce people with Debroys’s facility for both Ancient languages and the literary aspects of their literature? Is religious nationalism, dare she say, necessary, or at least largely helpful, for such creation and production? Though Kanakia is a staunch Liberal, she fears the Liberal academic system is incapable of creating the best people for the job, or even people for the job at all.
Barabara Loots lets in a little light
At Light Poetry Magazine, Barbara Loots has a review of Coleman Glenn’s hilarious and thought-provoking book of (primarily) light verse, A Little Light.
Somehow, poetry lost its place in the life of our time. Readers began to think of it as a mystery to be puzzled out in school, not an everyday pleasure. The audience for “poetry” shriveled into academia. . . In his new collection, Coleman Glenn hits a rare sweet spot–and I don’t mean sweet the way I grooved it as the empress of sentiment at Hallmark. His poems are accessible, but far from simplistic. His craft adheres to my highest rule: Not a syllable wasted. His humanity shines in the events and relationships he records in conversational verse.
Aaron Poochigian’s Classical Chinese translations
This may be a bit of an unorthodox suggestion in the type of list I am writing here, but I highly recommend following Aaron Poochigian on Twitter/X (@Poochigian) for his marvelous translations of Classical Chinese poetry into English verse. As far as I know, this is his main outlet of getting these poems (usually from the Tang Dynasty) out into the world. It is a shame to the publishing industry that no publisher has scooped up a collection of these translations for an official release.
James Matthew Wilson and The Wayward Thomist
Finally, here is something not out yet but for which you should keep your eyes wide open: an upcoming entry in Wiseblood Books’ monograph series—James Matthew Wilson’s “The Wayward Thomist: A Critical Introduction to John Martin Finlay.”
If you do not know Finlay, I know of no better short introduction currently available than Elijah Blumov’s Versecraft podcast episode on the man. That short introduction will only be bested when Wilson’s monograph appears in wider circulation. For a comprehensive introduction to Finlay, buy Wiseblood’s The Collected Poems of John Martin Finlay and The Collected Prose of John Martin Finlay, both edited by David Middleton and John P. Doucet.
As the Wiseblood description reads:
John Finlay’s poems are almost all in traditional literary forms. He mainly wrote plain-style lyrics of direct statement, short narratives, and post-symbolist poems whose sensuous details exhibit controlled associationism in which definite ideas and feelings are indirectly yet logically presented. Whether plain-style, narrative, or post-symbolist, Finlay’s poems are serious, simple, deep, direct, and often traumatically revealing of the human condition. The best of them are truly unforgettable. . . Readers who want serious poems that vividly present sensuous experience as understood by a mature mind steeped in classical and Christian tradition, yet fully aware of the problems of the contemporary world and of the perpetual threat of the primitive and the irrational, should find much here to contemplate.
Meanwhile, check out the rest of Wiseblood’s monograph series, which is honestly one of my favorite series of releases in current publishing. These beautifully constructed, compact little pamphlets (“The Wayward Thomist” is 65 pages) wonderfully highlight the possibilities contained within the musings of a good literary essay. My favorites include James Matthew Wilson’s “T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy,” Dana Gioia’s “Poetry as Enchantment,” and Ryan Wilson’s “How to Think Like a Poet.”
The Thing Itself
Ned Balbo’s “Strange Matings” in Light
Jesse Keith Butler’s “The Sunday Painters” in Traces
Cameron Clark’s “The Education of the Blind Poet; Or, Ars Poetica Ending with a Line from Milton” on Versecraft
D.A. Cooper’s “AI Prepares for the Apocalypse” in Light
Maryann Corbett’s “Nightmare Recitative” at Eclectica
Mori Creech’s “The Backward Look” and “Tarot” in The New Criterion
Nicole Caruso Garcia’s “Just for Good Measure” in Light
Coleman Glenn’s “Magical Thinking” in Poems for Persons of Interest (winner of Alex Rettie’s PfPoI Halloween Sonnet Contest)
Ernest Hilbert’s “The First of February” in Cassandra Voices
Burl Horniachek’s “Solomon” in Traces
Matthew King’s “Election” in Rattle (in the Poets Respond series)
D.S. Martin’s “Cardinal Virtues” in Traces
Shane McCrae’s “Maxim Kuzminov Dying,” “Blank Verse Sonnet on Here We Go Again,” and “Lines Written for a Fortieth Birthday” at POETRY and “Sonnet in Which Most of the Rhymes Fail” at The New York Review
Mary Jo Salter’s “An Alley in Avignon”
Daniel Patrick Sheehan’s “Daylight Moon” in Autumn Sky Poetry
Contemporary Classics
Of all the contemporary poems I have read in the last five years, I do not think of any as often as I think of Marly Youmans’s “Woman, Tree, Rain.” I thought of it again today while staring out my office window at what is left of Fall’s painted leaves. Here are two of the stanzas:
The low, wide Japanese tree’s elegant. Its salmon maple leaves are rained to red, Its splay of spindles slicked to jet by rain… Its bonfire burns the rain, and all the world Seems thirsty-eyed and staring at the sight, The central mast, the axis of all things…
If you would like to read some seasonal poems by yours truly, I have two chapbooks available you might find interesting. The first is Songs for Christmas, pairing poems of mine with lovely artwork. You can buy Songs for Christmas on Amazon. The second is a free PDF chapbook available at my website The Flummoxed: Before Apokalypto
And, now, back to you, Steve!