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
September 5, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Yongyu Chen on “Outpost” By Yongyu Chen “This was my desk. Below the window is a children’s playground.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Yongyu Chen’s “Outpost” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 252. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I started this poem in late September in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I came back from a long trip in Asia and was waking early because of the time difference. I felt good! I was writing a lot. I wrote the first draft after a sequence of experiences that felt like experiences already while I was inside them—starting with meeting, for the first time, a friend’s close friend and ending with a walk home on a gray day, after rain, looking at the oak branches on the ground. It felt like the feeling of wanting to pick up the oak pieces—and noticing it, then making myself do so—did something to the previous experiences. When I came home, I started writing the poem. Read More
September 4, 2025 On Poetry A Lyric Nation: On the Uncollected Dream Songs By Shane McCrae From “Six American Days and One Night,” a portfolio by David Bowes that appeared in the Spring 1984 issue of The Paris Review. The United States is a lyric nation. It has a geography suited to epic, and an expanse suited to epic, but it is organized in a lyric way—organizationally, the United States has more in common with Astrophil and Stella than Paradise Lost. Each state is a lyric, and the nation as a whole is a lyric sequence—or, better, a lyric group. That is to say, the United States is many individual poems that can also be understood as one poem. This organizational feature and the resulting constant tension between individual states and the federal government—that the states seem always, even if at times only minimally, to threaten to pull entirely away from the nation—are, I think, among the several reasons that no successful traditional epic poem, no Aeneid, has been produced in the United States (the exception that proves the rule being Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, both traditional epic and anti-epic at once). But John Berryman’s The Dream Songs is an epic. It has taken me years to realize that The Dream Songs is an epic—and a successful, even great one. For years, I searched for the successful traditional epic I felt certain must have been written by an American, and although I more than once encountered poems that seemed to fit the bill formally, none of them seemed an artistic success to me. Most often, they were let down by their language, which was commonly pedestrian, almost as if it were a secondary or even tertiary concern of their authors. But, of course, the language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem—and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression. The language of The Dream Songs is always either compressed or suggestive of compression. The poem has this, and little else, in common with traditional epic. Read More
July 11, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Eugene Ostashevsky on “Falling Sonnet XI” By Eugene Ostashevsky The second draft of “Falling Sonnet XI.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Eugene Ostashevsky’s “Falling Sonnet XI” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 252. How did you come up with the title for this poem? This is the eleventh poem in a series called Falling Sonnets. They are “sonnets” in the sense that each has fourteen lines with a Petrarchan logical structure, although without meter or rhyme. Right now, there are twelve, although I would prefer to have fourteen. The series reacts to one of the wars currently being fought. I’d prefer not to name which one—as soon as you do, the poem’s reception depends on how readers feel about the war rather than on anything having to do with the poem. Four other poems from the series have recently appeared in n+1. My most recent book is called The Feeling Sonnets, and sections in it are called “Fooling Sonnets,” “Feeding Sonnets,” and even “Leafing Sonnets.” When I finished, I wanted to stop writing these sonnets, which aren’t real sonnets, anyway. But I was too busy to lay aside enough time to develop a new form for a new book, so I kept writing them, much to my chagrin. This is why I call my new sonnet book “The Failing Sonnets,” and a part of it is a cycle called “The Falling Sonnets,” because it reacts to a war that feels as if it had my name on it and that destabilizes my sense of self in unpleasant ways. Read More
June 20, 2025 On Poetry Dickinson’s Dresses on the Moon By Cori Winrock Collage. US Postal Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Project Apollo Archive, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Look closely at any moon landing photograph and you will find fine gray plus signs in a grid across each one—plus signs that allowed for distortion to be corrected + for distance and height to be calibrated from space as well as on the moon’s surface. That could stitch a panoramic sequence of images + plot the moon. Each Hasselblad camera the astronauts brought was fitted with a clear glass plate etched with this precise network, a réseau of stitches—pinning the moon to the moon to keep its surface and the vast black horizon in line. Reseau: a grid + a reference marking pattern on a photograph or sewing paper + an intelligence network + a net of fine lines on glass plates + a foundation in lace. +++ Look closely at many Emily Dickinson poems and you will find + signs that indicate a variant in a line. A variant may appear + above a word + to the side of a line + underneath a word + at right angles to the poem + stacked at the end like a solution to an equation. Whole poems + sequences may be variants of one another. Dickinson did not choose among her variants, offering them as concurrent alternatives— evocative lace constellations left for us to hold up to our future sky as we try to align the wild nights + noons of her poems + epistolary impulses. Stitched across the surface of her work—plus signs that allow for + stray signals + distortion + that calibrate interior vastness. +++ Read More
May 28, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Nasser Rabah and Wiam El-Tamami on “The War Is Over” By Nasser Rabah and Wiam El-Tamami The first few lines of the Arabic original of “The War Is Over.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Nasser Rabah’s poem “The War Is Over,” translated from the Arabic by Wiam El-Tamami, appears in our new Spring issue, no. 251. Here, we asked both Rabah and El-Tamami to reflect on their work. 1. Nasser Rabah How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I live in Gaza. In the early months of the war, we weren’t expecting it to last for so long. I kept telling my children that it would all be over in a few days, in a week—and every time, I was disappointed. It’s a sad thing, to be proved wrong in front of your children. But somehow, out of stubbornness or self-protection, I started denying reality, believing in my own optimism. I said to myself, The war is over. I jotted that sentence down in the Notes app on my phone, and left it there. The next day, I asked myself, What would I do if the war was over? I thought, I would go to the graveyard to visit my friends whose funerals I hadn’t been able to attend. So I wrote down one more sentence—“I’ll go to the graveyard.” I still wasn’t thinking of it as a poem. But then poetry overtook me, and I wrote, “I’ll take bread, a lot of bread, one loaf for each friend.” When the stanza was finished, I felt a rush of adrenaline, that nervous energy that accompanies the birth of a new poem. And I kept going. Read More