July 14, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Zain Baweja on “Gloss” By Zain Baweja Scan of Zain Baweja’s notebook. In our series Making of a Poem, we ask poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Zain Baweja’s “Gloss,” which appears in our Summer issue, no. 256, plays with the etymological lineage and various translations of the word gul, or “rose,” across Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and English, among others. Our editorial intern James Langan, who pored over many archaic dictionaries to fact-check Baweja’s poem, spoke with him for this installment. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I don’t know when my fascination with the word gul began. I kept encountering novel uses of it in my readings of Urdu and Persian literature. In the Indo-Persian epic Dastan-e-amir hamza, for instance, there is a passage that uses the phrase gul khana (“to eat roses”) as the term for scarring oneself. It turns out, according to Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, that it was once a custom for lovers to burn themselves with a hot iron to prove their intense passion; it was also customary to treat “madness” with cauterization. A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (1884) by John T. Platts. Scan of page 911, via Internet Archive. These archaic uses led me to bilingual dictionaries, like John Thompson Platts’s A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English and Francis Joseph Steingass’s A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary. In both texts, each entry is formatted as one dense and continuous paragraph. Multiscript headwords, definitions, idioms, and compound phrases are all crammed together into a single block of text, separated only by semicolons and em dashes. I felt a peculiar shock when reading these entries, which gather usages that traverse centuries and geographical regions and place them side by side. It is the sort of temporal compression found in a poem, and it attuned me to the mutability of words I thought I knew. I started collecting all the definitions of the word gul I could find. I wrote down entries from Platts and Steingass as well as colloquial uses from my own memory. My notes began to look like a glossary for some absent text. I decided to retain that indexical structure as a poetic form. Read More
June 17, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Hannah Piette on “Nijinsky Dancing” By Hannah Piette Nijinski Dancing by Lincoln Kirstein. All photographs courtesy of Hannah Piette. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Four poems by Hannah Piette appear in our new Summer issue, no. 256. Here, she dissects “Nijinsky Dancing.” How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I was tasked in a drawing class to draw a figure in space. I knew at once where to find the figure—in my giant, golden book Nijinsky Dancing. Although we cannot watch videos of Nijinsky dancing, the book assembles a photographic record of his motions. I was taking adult-beginner ballet classes and reading the New York School poet and dance critic Edwin Denby’s writings on dance. In his essay “Notes on Nijinsky Photographs,” he observes Nijinsky’s technique only through photographs and writes that Nijinsky discovered how to control the “variability” of a face, as his face transforms from role to role. I chose a photograph of him leaping, in the costume of a prince. It was one of my first drawings of a person. I couldn’t get his face right. I kept erasing it and drawing new faces over the half-erased marks. He looked askew, covered in charcoal smudges. It wasn’t the single photograph that was the beginning of this poem, but the shifts between his figures across the photographs and the shifts between his faces and the erased faces I drew. In his roles, Nijinsky “disappears completely,” Denby writes, and remains “detached” from the imaginary characters that take his place, and who exist “independently of himself, in the objective world.” I wanted to write a poem that would work toward this technique. Was it possible to write a poem in which my face completely disappeared? Read More
April 16, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Jeffrey Angles on “Memory of a Three-Year-Old” By Jeffrey Angles The writer in 1936. Nakahara family, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Jeffrey Angles’s translation of “Memory of a Three-Year-Old” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 255. This is one of two poems you’ve translated for this issue by Nakahara Chuya. To start, could you tell us a little about Chuya and the poem’s backstory? Nakahara Chuya (1907–1937) was a Japanese avant-garde Modernist poet. Although he had a short life and career, today he is one of the best-known twentieth-century poets, remembered for his intensely personal poems and unusual, striking diction. He is routinely included in Japanese-literature textbooks, and his poems have been set to music countless times. “Memory of a Three Year-Old” is a strange little poem that first appeared in the April 1936 issue of Bungei hanron (Literary counterarguments) and was included in Chuya’s second book of poetry, Arishi hi no uta (Songs of days that were, 1938), which was published not long after Chuya’s premature death from tuberculous meningitis. The memory described in this poem seems to date from Chuya’s early childhood, shortly after he returned to Japan after a couple of months spent in Manchuria, where his father, a high-ranking military doctor, was stationed following the Russo-Japanese War. Whether or not he had a roundworm infection like the one described in this poem is a fact lost to history, but there was a persimmon tree in the courtyard of his home at that time. In a letter to a friend, dated April 12, 1936, Chuya comments that his son had recently turned eighteen months old. He fantasized about withdrawing to the countryside, where he could relax and play with his boy. It seems that thinking about playing with his son prompted Chuya to reflect on his own past. Read More
March 18, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Joyelle McSweeney on “My Fortune” By Joyelle McSweeney Fritz Geller-Grimm, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Joyelle McSweeney’s “My Fortune” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 255. How did this poem start for you? For about a year I found the news so bleak that I turned away from the present tense and made myself a connoisseur of Fortune—the grave goods packed into the Pharaoh’s tomb—his mask, his cats, his casket. From the window of my phone, from the cold black cell of my wakefulness, I would watch rival Egyptologists make competing cases, revolving algorithmically, in and out of view. I watched Cocktails with a Curator, a series of hypererudite videos recorded by Frick Gallery staff from their apartments in New York at the height of lockdown, replayed now in sequence like a journal of the plague year—this swain, his lover, this horse, his Polish rider, this hat, this collar, this pearl. This vial. This tipsy lethal cup. One night, prowling among my treasures in the dark like a crone-ghost or crow, I saw a glittering promotion for some past Sotheby’s or Christie’s auction of a priceless silver service from the eighteenth century. It was laid out on a dark dining table, where you would expect to see such things in use, yet the pieces were crammed on all together, at once, as you never would expect to see them—all the tureens, all the platters, all the chargers, all the salts. And they were thickly lit, from every angle, as you would also never see in life. The light rinding the silver was unnatural, strange, dead. Some lord had lost his fortune. Read More
February 24, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Monzer Masri and Robyn Creswell on “A Palestinian, a Sudanese, and the third was a Moroccan” By Monzer Masri and Robyn Creswell Images courtesy of Monzer Masri. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Monzer Masri’s poem “A Palestinian, a Sudanese, and the third was a Moroccan,” translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell, appears in our new Winter issue, no. 254. Here, we asked both Masri and Creswell to reflect on their work. 1. Monzer Masri Do you have photographs of different drafts of this poem? Yes, I don’t usually get rid of early versions of poems or book manuscripts. I keep them all, even now, in clear plastic envelopes, though they aren’t organized by date or by subject. The problem is that whenever I go back to them, which I do from time to time, I invariably add to the chaos—so much so that I despair of ever getting them in order. Which is why it took me a few hours to find the oldest version I still have of “A Palestinian, A Sudanese, and the third was a Moroccan,” dated June 3, 1977. That exactly matches the date of the manuscript—in the image below, it’s the notebook with the red cover—for Bashar wa tawarikh wa amkina (People, dates, and places), which was published by the Syrian Ministry of Culture at the end of 1979. Read More
January 13, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Jana Prikryl on “Dover Calais” By Jana Prikryl The English Channel. Photograph by Markus Trienke, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Jana Prikryl’s “Dover Calais” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 254. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? In the most basic sense it started with an implicit, unstaged scene from King Lear—Cordelia’s flight from England with her new husband, France, after she’s been banished by her father. I’d been circling Lear for about a year at that point, writing dramatic monologues from approximately Cordelia’s point of view, based on what she experiences in the play. (She experiences quite a lot, even if most of it is only reported by other characters.) I guess more specifically it began with an image of Cordelia falling into the water as her ferry crosses the English Channel. As I wrote these monologues, I wasn’t really interested in making up plot, making up fresh scenes for her to go through—I was trying more to eavesdrop on her language as the play unfolds, but curiously her language often made things happen. That image of her falling in hit me like a memory, which may be why I felt able to write about it, and why the poem opens with that blunt declaration, “I fell in once …” Read More