January 17, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Emily Osborne on “Cruel Loss of Sons” By Emily Osborne An early draft of a stanza of “Cruel Loss of Sons.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. A selection from Emily Osborne’s translation of Egill Skallagrímsson’s “Cruel Loss of Sons” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 250. What was the challenge of this particular translation? The poetry of the Icelandic and Norwegian skalds, or poets, from the Viking Age—the late eighth to mid-eleventh century C.E.—is notoriously challenging to translate. It was composed orally and passed down orally for generations before being written down in manuscripts. As a result, in the extant manuscripts and runic fragments found on sticks that preserve the poetry, we find variations in redactions, illegible or illogical word choices made by scribes, and frequent references to obscure myths and cultural traditions. Simply understanding a skaldic poem requires a fair amount of background scholarship. The skaldic practice of using compound kennings, in which metaphors and symbols are substituted for regular nouns, adds another layer of complexity. For instance, in this poem, Egill calls his head the “wagon of thought,” his mouth the “word-temple,” and Odin the “maker of bog-malt.” Above and beyond gleaning the literal meaning of words, a translator must also be able to understand the frequent and surprising tone shifts that add shades of insinuation or emotion. Statements that seem illogical could be ironic or expressing litotes. In “Cruel Loss of Sons,” I found it particularly difficult to interpret Egill’s tone when he speaks of his strained relationship with his patron god, Odin, and the other gods after the death of his sons. In lines such as these, the emotions communicated are ambiguous: “I was on good terms / with the spear-god, / trusted in him, / tokened my loyalty, / until that trainer / of triumphs, champion / of chariots, cut cords / of closeness with me”; and “I’d scuffle with / the sea-god’s girl.” Is the poet indicating betrayal? Sorrow? Defiance? Incredulity? Anger? Self-deprecation? Absurdity? When translating, it can be hard to avoid pinning down the tone too neatly. My task with this poem was to allow grief to carve out its own emotional track. Read More
January 6, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Hua Xi on “Toilet” By Hua Xi For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Hua Xi’s poem “Toilet” appears in the new Winter issue of the Review, no. 250. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? While I was writing this poem, I was going back and forth from the U.S. to China to take care of a family member. There was a lot of “going” in my life. I was thinking a lot about things that would be “gone” soon. I think the word go has a lot of depth. It means to go somewhere and it also means to use the bathroom. People will say “I need to go” to excuse themselves politely in a social setting. There’s a feeling of freedom associated with the term that’s somewhat illusory, since the verb by itself, lacking an object, does not actually “go” anywhere at all. Read More
October 11, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Mark Leidner on “Sissy Spacek” By Mark Leidner An early draft of “Sissy Spacek.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Mark Leidner’s poem “Sissy Spacek” appears in the new Fall issue of the Review, no. 249. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? When the novel Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner came out, I thought about how weird it would be to be a man whose name was “Mann.” I thought about how arbitrary names are, and how strange it would be to be assigned such an empty template. I tried to write a poem made up of people with Man or Mann in their names, but the only three I could think of (Michael Mann, Aimee Mann, and Man Ray) weren’t enough for a poem. I added “Al Michaels,” which is an odd name for different reasons: he seems to have two first names, and both are extremely ordinary. Maybe insecurity about my own relatively ordinary first name fueled these concerns. Read More
September 25, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Sara Gilmore on “Safe camp” By Sara Gilmore From Ernst Lehner’s Symbols, Signs and Signets. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Sara Gilmore’s poems “Mad as only an angel can be” and “Knowing constraint” appear in the new Fall issue of the Review, no. 249. The poem she discusses here, “Safe camp,” is published on the Daily. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? Originally this poem began with the lines “Delay and pressed the reeling available / Would-be constant down this inhabited suddenness.” It never troubled me that the words together didn’t make sense or that I didn’t yet know what they were pointing to—I thought of them as an assembly of beautiful raw material to work with. As I continued to work on the poem, the image that rose to mind was a ditch along a narrow country road I often strolled down with my son near Mairena del Aljarafe when we lived in Spain. It was filled with trash and reels of unwound VHS tapes. We walked by it hundreds of times. The poem began to grow around the word “reeling”—the “real” along with everything the real is not, the dizzying motion of “reeling,” Anne Carson’s notion “under this day the reel of another day.” This figure of reeling gave into the poem’s circuitry as a whole—the way it shorts out as if its webbing could open to reveal layers underneath, suggesting a kind of sinkhole that either delivers us from or constricts us into a frame of reality that runs along our lives eternally. For me, these sinkholes are dangerous and fascinating. This is one of the poem’s anxieties—the possibility of a circularity of circumstance or time in which what I’m living today could be the actual present, or a day I lived long ago, or a day I haven’t lived yet at all. The poem surfaced into clarity in the lines that, in the version published here, appear first. “I was still but tried, in a burst it’s all lit up by.” I like to think the original lines are still there—what my friend Timmy calls the rungs of the ladder that we’re no longer standing on but got us here. Read More
July 24, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Patty Nash on “Metropolitan” By Patty Nash Anton Mauve, The Return to the Fold, 1978. Public domain. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Patty Nash’s poem “Metropolitan” appears in the new Summer issue of the Review, no. 248. Do you have photos of different drafts of this poem? I do not write in “drafts.” I just continue to write or tinker on the same poem until I can’t anymore. This means that it is hard to see earlier iterations of the poem—the earliest one I have access to is one that I sent to my friends, so it was somewhat presentable already. There are small line differences, however, and sometimes major ones. For example, I changed the gender of the protagonist in this section—here is a screenshot of an earlier version: I also slimmed down the ending, thank goodness. Earlier version here as well: Read More
July 8, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Kim Hyesoon and Cindy Juyoung Ok on “Person Walking Backward” By Kim Hyesoon and Cindy Juyoung Ok Achat1999, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Kim Hyesoon’s poem “Person Walking Backward,” translated by Cindy Juyoung Ok, appears in our new Summer issue, no. 248. Here, we asked Kim and Ok to reflect on their work. 1. Kim Hyesoon How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? This poem began during an interview. The poet who came to interview me asked, “What do you think about Korean poetry these days?” I answered, “I think Korean poetry these days is like a dog running on the highway.” There is a dog inside my poem. This dog living in “Person Walking Backward” is eternally digging through the “pile of garbage” of the present. The poem is a poem about time, two types of time. Continuous time and frozen time. The dog’s time and my life’s time. The poem’s time and my time. Dying’s time and living’s time. Each is the possibility of being to one another. Read More