Volume 110, Number 3/4
 |
It’s essential to keep in mind that in poetry the music comes first, before everything else, everything else…. Thought, meaning, vision, the very words, come after the music has been established, and in the most mysterious way they’re already contained in it.—C.K. Williams (“On Whitman: The Music”) Cover Caption: “Halloween, 110th Street, New York, 1968” © Arthur Tress (Web site: arthurtress.com) |
Editors’ Page
Costumed for Halloween, the child in our cover photo is a spy, a cyborg, a cartoon listener. We can’t tell what he’s hearing (a scuffling of dry leaves, wind in high branches, the swoosh of a passing car), but we can see he’s “all ears.” For him as for us, sound enters at the ear but blossoms in the brain as we try to discern its message or its music or the nature of its noise. And if what we hear is both language and music—if it says and sings—it may well be poetry.
In his provocative 1959 essay “How You Sound??,” a very brief manifesto on the nature of poetic voice, Amiri Baraka wrote the following (all ellipses are his from the original text): “The only ‘recognizable tradition’ a poet need follow is himself…& with that, say, all those things out of tradition he can use, adapt, work over, into something for himself. To broaden his own voice with. (You have to start and finish there…your own voice…how you sound.)”
Because how a poet sounds matters so much to us at Poet Lore, we read the poems we’re considering aloud to one another at each editorial meeting—a decisive exercise. Too often, stanzas that looked promising on the page fall flat in the air. Among the many poets in this issue whose sounds are unmistakably their own, you’ll find D. Nurkse (“I was a new hire in the wireworks / in Atherton…), Carl Phillips (“Fate / stakes the final claim, as if forever breaking / ground…”), Jill Leininger (“The body is wise and beguiling”), Jo Brachman (“you continued / on your merry way, dead”), R.T. Smith (“The flag irises were thriving wild in the ditch”), and Tony Hoagland (“the Bible keeps being written / by two hands at once— / each one crossing the text of the other out”). In the back of the book, look for Mark Sullivan’s “Say the Word,” an essay that explores the threshold between hearing and interpreting word-sounds, along with incisive reviews of seven recent books.
It’s hard to describe but easy to recognize the cadences of poetry. As Robert Frost wrote in a letter to his former student John Bartlett a century ago: “The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader….I wouldn’t be writing all this if I didn’t think it the most important thing I know.”
Poetry
D. Nurkse
The Name on the Plinth
Porch Lamps
Nicole Pekarske
Fall
Renee Gherity
To Robert Lowell, In October
Peter Davis
Coming Home Again
Doug Ramspeck
The Grief of Pigeons
Riverbed
Carl Phillips
And Love You Too
Lois Marie Harrod
Irene Fick
We Didn’t Know Anything
Jo Brachman
Native Medicine
Second Death
Brian Clifton
Apocalypse with Suburbia
Zoe Polach
The Tulip Poplar
Dian Duchin Reed
The Tree Circus
Roger Desy
lightfall
Brian Swann
Coyote
Brian Swann
Hrafn
R.T. Smith
Skink
Keel Bone
Carol Hamilton
Superman Suits
Joseph A. Chelius
On Watching Replays of a Pitcher Struck in the Face by a Comeback Line Drive
Tony Hoagland
Going Soft
Bible Still Being Written
Margaret Randall
Written in Patria o Muerte
Christopher Presfield
Prison: The Moment
Thug #1
Robert Tremmel
The man next door
T.J. Sandella
Apartment B
Gary Fincke
The Secret Voice
James Crews
“Scents Were Everywhere That Night”
Jill Leininger
Seasonal Epilogues
Janice Lynch Schuster
Atmospheric Pressure
Jessica Greenbaum
Approaching Rain
Rachel Mennies
Blockbuster
Robin Becker
Ballroom
Security Clearance
John Bargowski
Jacknife
Luck
David McAleavey
Mother love
Levitating the Pentagon, 1967
Joseph Bathanti
Good Friday: March 24, 1967
Richard Krohn Thanksgiving 1968
Gary Stein
Just a Trim
Rod Jellema
Lynchburg, Virginia, 1969
Marc Swan
Before the body count
Ray Hadley
Free Matches
Kim Lozano
The Ice Stopped Here
Daryl Jones
Tomatoes
D. Nurkse
Growing Old in the Foothills
James Scruton
Work
Premonition
Bryce Emley
Stroke (My Father as Weed-Eater)
Marjorie Stelmach
Bearings
Matthew J. Spireng
Ascending
Steven Ratiner
Filial
Meg Eden
Contesting
Foreigner
David Lehman
Time after Time: Seventeen Haiku
Ruth Holzer
Nightly Tally
Susan Bucci Mockler
The Chapel Street School Fire
David Thacker
Pregnancy Date Night Evening Walk
Erica Lee Braverman
To My Neighbors Canoodling
Charles Jensen
How to Fall in Love with Strangers
Poets Introducing Poets
Grace Cavalieri introduces Abdul Ali
Praise Song #6
Gotham ’Round Midnight
On Fortune
Four Blue Stanzas
I Now Sleep with a Plastic Mask
After Ferguson, New Year’s Eve, 2014
On Editing a Documentary on Jean-Michel Basquiat
Notes Toward an Origin Story
The Prince
Essay
Mark Sullivan “Say the Word”
Reviews
Mark Raymond “After the Pastoral”
Caribou
by Charles Wright
Richard Logsdon “Into the Light”
Paradise Drive
by Rebecca Foust
Judy Neri “Thoughts on Poetry of Conscience and Commitment”
Kind
by Gretchen Primack
We Didn’t Know Any Gangsters
by Brian Gilmore
Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations
by Naomi Ayala
Barbara Goldberg “Journeys into Foreign Terrains”
Day of the Border Guards
by Katherine E. Young
Graffiti Calculus
by Mary-Sherman Willis
Jacqueline Kosolov “Embodying Agony: A New Mother on the Margins of War”
Blood Lyrics
by Katie Ford