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
December 15, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Millicent Borges Accardi on “Good Tank Farms” By Millicent Borges Accardi Tetney Tank Farm: aerial 2025 (2) by Simon Tomson, CC BY-SA 2.0, 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. Millicent Borges Accardi’s “Good Tank Farms” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 254. How did this poem start? A teacher, Gay Talese, once advised me to incorporate my day jobs into my writing. At the time, I was working for a dog food manufacturing plant on Malt Avenue in Commerce, California. I’d also worked in oil refineries for ten years or so. I worked at the ARCO Carson refinery as a technical writer from 1992 to 1997, as well as for other refineries and oil-related companies such as BP, ampm, and ARCO Marine (oil tankers). From 1997 to 2016, I was a contractor at Chevron, supporting their refineries from El Segundo, California, to Pascagoula, Mississippi. I had my own safety glasses, hard hat (adorned with worn stickers), and blue fire-retardant Nomex coveralls with my name patch over the pocket. I was familiar with the quirky systems and individuals who make up a ruff-and-ready refinery workplace. I wanted to write about a technical work location in a poetic way—about the serious aspects of blue-collar work, but also its magnificent moments of reflection. I’ve always admired Fred Voss, and his poetry about being a machinist at an aircraft plant in Long Beach. I wish we had more blue-collar writers these days. Where are the Jack Londons? And the Steinbecks? Where are the writers who work on the dock? Where are stevedores, the longshoremen? The pipe fitters? The electricians? Read More
November 17, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Naomi Harris on “Telipinu went” By Naomi Harris šalḫanti-/šalḫiyanti- lexical filing card, with this paragraph from the Disappearance of Telipinu in the Chicago Hittite Dictionary. Courtesy of the author. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Naomi Harris’s translations of three Hittite poems appear in our new Fall issue, no. 253. Here, we asked Harris to reflect on her translation “Telipinu went.” The Hittites spoke an Indo-European language and ruled a major empire during the Late Bronze Age, in what is now Turkey. Their capital was multicultural and multilingual. Their language, which we call Hittite, they called Nešili, the language of Neša. “Telipinu went” translates a paragraph from the Hittite text that we call The Disappearance of Telipinu. The text was written in cuneiform script on a clay tablet, found at the Hittite capital Ḫattuša, near modern-day Boğazkale in Çorum, Türkiye. There are several versions, and it was copied again and again over the course of Hittite history; this one dates from about 1450–1350 B.C. “Telipinu went” is an extract from a longer manuscript. Can you tell us about that? In the full manuscript, the god Telipinu, son of the Stormgod, becomes angry and leaves, taking all the good things away with him. Famine and disaster ensue in both the mortal and divine realms. The waters, mountains, and woods dry up. Cows no longer recognize their calves. Ewes no longer recognize their lambs. The world is twisted and out of joint. No one can become pregnant, and those who are pregnant cannot give birth. The Sungod throws a party, and although the gods eat and drink as usual, they find that they are still hungry. When the Stormgod realizes that his son has left, the great gods and the small gods search everywhere for Telipinu but do not find him. The Sungod, host of the party, sends a swiftly flying eagle, but the eagle doesn’t find him. The Stormgod makes a pathetic effort to find his son and gives up far too quickly. Finally, the grandmother goddess, Ḫannaḫanna, sends a bee that finds Telipinu and stings him awake. The bee returns Telipinu, and they perform a ritual brimming with exquisite similes to remove his anger and reconcile him with the world again. Read More
October 17, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Natasha Wimmer on “I Wasn’t Always This Ugly” By Natasha Wimmer Roque Dalton in exile in Havana, Cuba, 1967. Casa de las Américas, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Roque Dalton’s poem “I Wasn’t Always This Ugly” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 253. Here, we asked Wimmer to reflect on her work. Can you tell us a little about Roque Dalton and your interest in him? Where was this poem originally published? Dalton was born in El Salvador in 1935 and is generally considered one of the greatest Latin American poets of the twentieth century. He was very politically engaged—he lived in exile from El Salvador for most of his life, including some crucial years spent in Cuba. In his thirties, he became increasingly committed to the armed struggle and joined a guerrilla group to fight in El Salvador. Four days before his fortieth birthday, he was shot by his comrades in an incident that has never been fully explained. I first encountered Dalton through my translations of Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño claimed to have met Dalton shortly before he was shot, and The Savage Detectives was clearly influenced by Dalton’s autobiographical novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo … (as yet untranslated). Over the course of translating him, I’ve fallen victim to his considerable charms—as seems to have been the case with everyone who met him. This poem was originally published as part of the collection Un libro levemente odioso (A Slightly Nasty Book, forthcoming), which I’ve been translating along with another work called Taberna y otros lugares (Tavern and Other Places, forthcoming). Both are part of a larger project by Seven Stories Press to bring Dalton into English. Until now, English-language readers have had only an anthology, Small Hours of the Night, and Dalton’s final collection, Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle. Read More
October 14, 2025 On Poetry Dear Louise By Spencer Reece Watercolor by Spencer Reece. Dear Louise, My garden thrums with bird calls. Canada goose and American robin, mourning dove, northern cardinal. Ruby-throated hummingbirds! A hawk’s claws clench the golden cross on the steeple; the hawk kills a bird every week, eviscerating bodies on the tops of telephone poles like a serial killer. Birds making melody, a concert kind and cruel—a call-and-response rough with rapture—a poetry with wings saying, Nourish, sustain, attack! All contained in a white picket fence—my garden adhering to the pressures of a sonnet. The pickets on the rectory lawn have finally been fixed by a young man headed to Connecticut College. Took three years here before I could find anyone to address this, as people walked by and complained about the state of the fence. Finally, a Roman Catholic attorney who I received into the Episcopal Church sent his son to do the work. Thank God for the Catholics, I say. From this garden, I’m waving to you on the American literary real estate of John Updike. Updike wrote in The Witches of Eastwick, based on this town: “You must imagine your life, and then it happens.” Indeed. I write from the porch of this rectory from 1798; I write a letter to you—letters, the slow art I’ve watched grow extinct in my lifetime. Read More
September 23, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Patricia Lockwood on “Party in the USA” By Patricia Lockwood Photograph courtesy of Patricia Lockwood. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Patricia Lockwood’s “Party in the USA” appears online today. Her poems “Perfect Pussy,” “The Ventifact,” and “Cave Painting” appear in our new Fall issue, no. 253. How did this poem start? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? The genesis of this one is almost comically literal. I was recording the audiobook for my new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, at a studio in Savannah, Georgia, and after my first session the sound engineer told me that Miley Cyrus had recorded “Party in the U.S.A.” in that very booth. (Why not tell me beforehand, so I could call upon her power?) On the second day, when we broke for lunch, I looked at my phone and saw that my sister had texted about an active shooter at the hospital where she works. Nothing makes you feel stupider than having just whipped off your bra in the “Party in the U.S.A.” booth while reading a book about your tiny little life so you can get more air into your idiotic diaphragm than your sister suddenly texting you the words “We’re on lockdown.” Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote it? I was. Many details in the poem are taken from Roger Shattuck’s 1980 classic The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, which had been sent to me by NYRB. Read More