October 10, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Olivia Sokolowski on “Lover of Cars” By Olivia Sokolowski An alternate ending to “Lover of Cars.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Olivia Sokolowski’s “Lover of Cars” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 245. How did writing the first draft feel to you? I’ve been into cars since I was around fifteen and daydreaming of nineties Jaguars, but somehow, I’d never written much about them. Along the I-75 last winter, noticing and cataloguing the steady stream of cars along the meridian, I decided it was time to convert my obsession into a poetic one. Prompts are normally tough for me—I feel put on the spot and all my good images flee. But when I set out to write about cars, the task-poem turned out far better than I imagined. Perhaps because the topic is so rich—cars not only engage all of our senses but are also thoroughly ingrained in our cultural and personal histories. I surprised myself with the veer toward a family/coming-of-age narrative. The more luxurious bits, like dreaming of an otherworldly Audi or joyriding through Cinque Terre, were just plain fun to write. I lived vicariously through my speaker. Read More
September 20, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: D. A. Powell on “As for What the Rain Can Do” By D. A. Powell Joshua Sampson, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. D. A. Powell’s “As for What the Rain Can Do” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 245. How did this poem start for you? This poem began as a silence of wishing. As one does when falling silent. One wishes a something that isn’t happening. Or a something that is happening but should happen (one wishes) differently. In this case, I was in my kitchen nook. Outside it was raining. But raining in that dire way—trees falling, streets flooding. And endlessly so. San Francisco was at the bottom of what meteorologists were calling an atmospheric river. In thirsty California, rain is so often wished for. And now here I was, wishing it away. I didn’t want to be against the rain. Read More
June 26, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Leopoldine Core on “Ex-Stewardess” By Leopoldine Core Leopoldine Core’s aura photo, courtesy of the author. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Leopoldine Core’s “Ex-Stewardess” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? Often a poem begins wordlessly. It’s as if the text is a reply to some cryptic spot in the back of my brain that I have become attracted to. I’m alerted to the presence of something that isn’t solid. It has more to do with feeling, tempo, scale, and temperature. I’m so focused on that emanating region that, even though I’m using words, my experience—the start of it—is wordless and meditative. How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? (Are there hard and easy poems?) Some poems come quick and others take a while. But maybe the one that took years was easier in the end—I don’t know. Certain poems require many rounds of rewording. When this happens I will rewrite one line forty or more times, then narrow it down to thirty, then fifteen, then five, then choose. Read More
June 14, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Richie Hofmann on “Armed Cavalier” By Richie Hofmann A draft of the first two pages of “Armed Cavalier.” Courtesy of Richie Hofmann. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Richie Hofmann’s “Armed Cavalier” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? As is so often the case for me, the poem began as another poem entirely. I was working on a poetic sequence that interposed my translations of Michelangelo’s homoerotic sonnets with several short, original haiku-like poems inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids. Both artists were interested in beauty and torture. Mapplethorpe’s photographs are experiments in self-portraiture and bondage. In one of Michelangelo’s sonnets, the speaker confesses that, in order to be happy, he must be conquered and chained, a prisoner of an “armed cavalier” (the phrase puns on the name of the object of Michelangelo’s infatuation, Tommaso dei Cavalieri). Upon reading that phrase, I instantly wanted it to be the title for a new poem that would express the extremity of sexuality and the extremity of making art. From the sonnets of Michelangelo, I wanted to import a kind of violence of rhetoric (not unlike the dramatic conceits we find again and again in Petrarch). The poems are so desperate. Their pain is sculptural. From the photographs of Mapplethorpe, I wanted to import a violence of image. And the sense that everything—flowers in a vase, classical sculpture, BDSM—is part of a landscape of embodied beauty. Ultimately, as I revised the poem, and reworked it into “Armed Cavalier,” I wanted to express the ferocity of feeling in both artists’ works, but without any overt ekphrastic framing. Read More
June 12, 2023 On Poetry The Bible and Poetry By Michael Edwards Initial S: A Monk Praying in the Water, Getty Center. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. We do not read the Bible as it is meant to be read. Theology always risks leading us astray by elaborating its own discourse, with the biblical texts merely as a point of departure. The presence of poetry in the Bible is the key to a more pertinent and more faithful reading. There are many poems found in the Bible. We know this, vaguely and without giving it too much thought, but shouldn’t we be rather astonished by the role of poetry in a collection of books with such a pressing and salutary Word to express? And shouldn’t we ask ourselves if the presence of this writing—so much more self-conscious and desirous than is prose of a form it can make vibrate—affects the biblical “message” and changes its nature? Read More
May 11, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Michael Bazzett on “Autobiography of a Poet” By Michael Bazzett For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Michael Bazzett’s “Autobiography of a Poet” appears in our Spring issue, no. 243. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? It was a phrase. I was sitting in my backyard, with a legal pad and a few books, including Fady Joudah’s Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance and After Ikkyu by Jim Harrison, which contains the line “I was born a baby, / what are these hundred suits of clothes I’m wearing?” I was thinking about dislocation and baby-logic, and object permanence, and the idea of first encountering something through a sense other than sight. Hearing a bird before you see it, for instance. Or how a visual stimulus like a leaf-shadow fluttering in the wind moves on the wall above a crib. In my baby-mind, I imagine that light-flicker as something animate, moving of its own accord. When does a baby stop engaging with stimuli as pure image or pure sound and begin to imagine what caused it? I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be able to reexperience the dreams we dream in utero, or in the first months of life before language, before we consciously encounter words and narrative structure. How would they be ordered? Where would the images come from? Do we bring anything with us from the other side? Are there things already written into us? Read More