October 4, 2024 On Poetry Bernadette Mayer on Her Influences By Bernadette Mayer Photograph of basalt by Marek Novotňák, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The first big influence on my writing was Nathaniel Hawthorne. My teacher in senior year of high school had written her doctoral thesis on The Marble Faun, if you can imagine that—and she was a nun! I went to one of the bookstores on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and bought a complete Riverside Editions set of Hawthorne’s writing. Later I added a volume, Septimius Felton; or, The Elixir of Life, two volumes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, and Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny. I had become addicted to his long, elegant prose sentences, which I studied and even diagrammed; a habit as old-fashioned as nuns. If you read the introductory essay to The Scarlet Letter, “The Customs House,” you will see what I mean. In it Hawthorne says that Hester Prynne became a social worker. As far as I know, Hawthorne did not write poetry, but he was an excellent candle-waster, in more ways than one. His writing made it clear that words have a magical quality to take you to another sphere but then you see that it’s only a book you are holding. I already had synesthesia in the form of seeing letters as different colors, so in many ways I was grateful to the author of The Scarlet Letter. Perhaps it was Hawthorne who inspired me to see prose as poetic. 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 contributed to 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
September 25, 2024 Poetry Safe camp By Sara Gilmore Photograph courtesy of the author. I was still but tried, in a burst it’s all lit up by. In the quiet permission I took my unit of heart and wondered if it was enough. Can’t in cannot, the backwater was canceled So a quiet commercial Could play inside instead. An artifact Gathered and became immobile, and even so Changed year to year until its recognition fell to wind itself. I felt myself. I felt myself inhabiting it so I felt myself. In everything To see a circular tape, again and Again I see it, determining the summer was suddenness Netting how images can melt, can melt the video lengthening some dream Because exhaust is unmanageable and so released. I push in the tape, Iridescent and wet. I’m soggy and failing at no end in sight And just figures on their way, where are they going, What is their position. Let me place you inside the deer To keep you warm. You can read two more poems by Sara Gilmore, “Mad as only an angel can be” and “Knowing constraint” in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review, no. 249. You can also read Gilmore’s thoughts on writing “Safe camp” here on the Daily. Sara Gilmore is a poet and translator. She teaches at the University of Iowa and works as a phlebotomist.
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 contributed to 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 contributed to 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
May 1, 2024 On Poetry Between the World and the Universe, a Woman Is Thinking By Sara Nicholson Poem by Alice Notley, in the collection Grave of Light. Courtesy of Wesleyan University Press. Photograph by Sara Nicholson. Poets have always known how inadequate language is. The speaker of this poem knows it well. No matter how hard she tries to capture the sublime or primordial essence of being, words fail her. Alice Notley herself has written about this in an essay, first published in 1998, called “The Poetics of Disobedience”: “I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don’t work, I know they aren’t it. I don’t in the least feel that everything is language.” Her poem “The World, All That Live & All That Occur” rubs up against the edge of the unsayable. Notice that it begins with “the world” and ends with “the Universe,” that its very structure points to the poem’s origin in and return to an infinite space beyond language. Paradoxically, impossibly, the poem is bounded by boundlessness. The poem’s situation is simple. A woman is looking out a window on a rainy day in New York City, 1977. She remembers a fight from the week before. She watches a man cross the street. She is also contemplating the nature of being, what she calls “the one organism.” This is how she defines it: “A monstrous life-death living not-dying / Caving-in upthrusting all over it- / Self like pits & mountains forever thing.” She’s speaking fast. These lines have a powerful rhythmic velocity. As she struggles to articulate an ontology, the words get squished together into a hilarious pileup of modifiers. It’s funny, awkward. She knows her definition is inadequate, but it’s the best she’s got. Read More