understanding my connection to Shez’s poetry

As I’ve been doing final (for now) edits on my translations of Shez’s poems, I keep feeling a kind of haunting—some of her words could be my own; I could definitely interweave the translations and my poems into a single, unified text. Sometimes I even dream about having my work translated into Hebrew and then [...]

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on Adrienne

from Hugh MacDiarmid’s manifesto “The Kind of Poetry I Want,” quoted by Adrienne in her speech/essay “Poetry and Commitment.” A poetry the quality of which Is a stand made against intellectual apathy, Its material founded, like Gray’s, on difficult knowledge And its metres those of a poet Who has studied Pindar and Welsh poetry, But, [...]

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Poets on Poets

Vladimir Khodasevich writing about Marina Tsvetaeva: Poets are not born in a country. Poets are born in childhood. What, then, is Russian about Marina Tsvetaeva? Tsvetaeva understood audial and linguistic work that play such an enormous role in folk song. Folk song is for the most part a litany, joyful or grieving. There is an [...]

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Novels vs. Poems

more from Sarah Maquire’s essay “‘Singing About the Dark Times’: Poetry and Conflict”, this time on the difference between the novel and poetry: But it is only in the past three hundred years, initially in Europe and then later in its colonies, that prose, specifically in the form of the novel, has taken over from [...]

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Thank you, Mr. Barnstone

When, among a group of translation students, I got to have a long and winding conversation with Willis Barnstone, he said many many smart (as in genius-level) things about translating. One of those has become not only my favorite, but my guiding mantra for poetry: When it seems impossible, try a little harder and it [...]

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April 1st – On the difference between a good poem and a great poem

(fess up time – I’ve been working on various drafts of this for a while now, but it finally solidified in re-visions this week, so I’m counting it as my first poem of the month) (2nd fess up – it may actually be prose. or a lyric essay. or a prose poem. it feels like [...]

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Making a Manuscript—Structuring Intuition

Inspired by Michelle Ovalle’s description of her process, a few notes on my own, up to this point. I’ve no idea where the manuscript as it exists will go as I revise over the next few months, but at least I feel now there is something there, some key structural element. When I started last [...]

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on making a manuscript

Here’s a great post from my friend and co-student Michelle Ovalle on creating her manuscript. She’s inspired me to try to describe what I’ve been up to, so look for a new post on that soon. Right now, I’m still recovering from the process and waiting to hear back from my mentor so I can [...]

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Poetry as protection from earthquakes, chaos, and disorder

from Gregory Orr’s amazing essay collection Poetry as Survival: The shape of a doorframe also represents a powerful architecture—during earthquakes, people are advised to stand in doorways because they are stronger and safer than anyplace else in a house. It’s possible to imagine the rectangle of a doorway as the rectangular shape of the page [...]

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consider what must be happening when we set out to produce a poem

There are no more two distinct brain sides than there are two distinct genders. Why would that surprise anyone who’s ever created anything? from “A Moment’s Thought” by Ellen Bryant Voigt in her excellent collection The Flexible Lyric The recent bicameral (and thoroughly Nietzschean) model—right brain for intuition, emotion, art, and music; left brain for [...]

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