Young Poet Research Articles

“I Hate You, Romeo.” A Heretic Re-writing of Romeo and Juliet

Abstract In the nineteen twenties last century a young poet and diplomat from Warsaw, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, was taking part in an international congress of intellectuals in Heidelberg. During his stay in Germany he wrote The Lovers of Verona (the title in Polish reads Kochankowie z Werony), a play that offers a radical reinterpretation of the main message of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Iwaszkiewicz’s vision of the young lovers, who are infected by insurmountable enmity, was determined by his pessimistic views on the nature of love and desire, expressed also in his other plays, prose and poetry. This article discusses the circumstances behind Iwaszkiewicz’s adaptation that shed light on the reasons for this unorthodox re-writing of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. This is done to highlight the complex interrelations between authorial writing and translation activity which in case of writer-translators are determined by a net of political, social and personal factors.

Pig Looks, Snake Looks: Coleridge’s Poetics of the Unsaid

ABSTRACT Conversation is a distinctive form of communication that balances verbal and nonverbal cues, and these qualities have marked affinities with how Romantic writers conceived of poetry’s unique effects upon readers, listeners, and poets themselves. As an example of these “conversational poetics,” this essay examines how Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who both authored the “conversation poems” and was a notoriously one-sided talker, was fixated on what Romantics would have called “natural signs” in his poetry and personal writings. Far from always having delivered monologues, Coleridge had a talent for multisensory communication. However, this same talent left him vulnerable in his intimate relationships, leading him to withdraw from close, communicative friendships into solipsistic lecturing. As a young poet, though, he had an ambitious concept of sympathy whose achievement sometimes proved too much to bear if he could not regulate it with verse. Examples include an 1803 notebook entry in which Coleridge and Wordsworth exchange a disconcerting “pig look.” This look is contrasted to Geraldine’s “serpent’s eye” in “Christabel.” The essay concludes that poems such as “Christabel” should inform our understanding of what constitutes a conversation poem, especially if we acknowledge Coleridge’s own attitudes toward conversation and the nonverbal components of poetry.

Translating Milosz and Haiku: An Interview with Robert Hass

Robert Hass is one of the best-known contemporary American poets. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1972 for Field ...

Arabic Performance Poetry: A New Mode of Resistance

Performance poetry, as a literary term, is known in the Western literature, although some critics may not consider it literary in the first place. This article assumes the applicability of this term to new attempts of some Egyptian youth whose poems share the common features of performance poetry in English literature. Their poetic works are passionate, rhythmic, using aural and visual effects in the background, and dialects in addition to the poet's presentation of the poem face to face with the audience. Regarding the content, their verse has preceded and accompanied the political turmoil Egypt witnessed before, during, and after 25 January Revolution. For this reason, this poetic pattern loudly reflects the concerns, demands, and aspirations of the rebellious generation of youth and the whole Egyptian society. It can be considered the manifestation of the new challenging spirit of the youth in Egypt. The aim of the research is to highlight the similarities between the Anglo-American performance poetry and the literary works of two Egyptian young poets: Hisham al-Gakh and Amr Qatamish. As an interdisciplinary study, literary criticism, cultural criticism including socio-political analysis will be utilized to elucidate how performance poetry represents a new trend of resisting corruption and injustice, as well as a revolution against conventional poetic forms.

Some Modern New Poets

Catchingupwithrecentpoetrypublications is always a lesson in contingency. Some poets – in the cases of John Wilkinson and Peter Gizzi – have published again since September, outdating the books closest to my chair. Some books only came to my attention once summer was already over. There are many poets that I simply haven’t got to. And yet there might be a mercy in these accidents: reading somewhat haphazardly allows one to draw up a bad map of the contemporary landscape, one which can be built upon in the months to come. Of the many symbols that might appear in the legend of that map, a poem's proximity to or distance from provinces of the poetic repertoire which might be thought of as traditional (such as fixed form, metre, and rhyme) has been a constant point of reference. The last four Faber New Poets – until further notice – are moving in decidedly various directions. Elaine Beckett (no. 13) has some well-turned anecdotes. Her response to Blackfish – the 2013 documentary film about Sea World – is funny. Her poem ‘Sometime this Month’ is in a different mode, a traditional song celebrating the blossoming of a certain tree in May, strong enough to bear updating to take in the teenagers on their lunch break. Crispin Best’s pamphlet (no. 14) is whimsical and witty in equal measure (‘I’m an optimist | that’s what I like about you’). There are some clever reversals in syntax here – ‘remember science is always doing something that we don’t understand to the sky’ – and deft repetition which makes for pop music. Yet this pamphlet remains awkwardly placed between satire and lyric, without striking a compromise. Sam Buchan-Watts (no. 15) has a knack for the poem as prose-vignette – a dangerous task, since it risks collapsing into a case of the young poet looking at stuff. Yet here are several successful pieces in the tradition of Woolf’s shorts or Stein’s early prose poetry, particularly his ‘study of two lamps and a painting’. ‘The Days go Just Like that’ and the following poem (the same title, held within quotation marks) are the best achieved in this collection, managing the relation between line and sense-unit flawlessly, as a stumbling consciousness awakes, emerging from a wood to look for the city. Rachel Curzon’s poems (no. 16) are most effective where most elliptical and epigrammatic. Tending towards the confessional mode, Curzon’s first pamphlet is more striking when it is less particular. Her simplistic diction is understated, and this is crucial to the comedy of the attack on middle-class aspiration in ‘Ultrasound’. However, this becomes more dangerous once the poems move to consider questions of motherhood, personhood, and ownership (‘The Catch’).

MICKIEWICZ I TREMBECKI – JESZCZE RAZ (JUŻ SIĘ Z POGODNYCH NIEBIOS…)

This short sketch focuses on the excerpt from Adam Mickiewicz’s early poem „Już się z pogodnych niebios…” (1818), where the young poet specifies the rules of receiving new members into the Philomath Society (Towarzystwo Filomatów). Mickiewicz drew the basic motif of that part of the poem from the last section of Stanisław Trembecki’s Classicist descriptive poem Sofijówka (verses 425nn). What in an Enlightenment poem characterised by clearly libertine and pro-Russian tendencies served the representative of the Stanislavian times to build an individual microethics programme which was concerend exclusively with one’s closest circle and their attitude towards themselves, in a programmatic poem by a young Romantic became a set of rules to select righteous and trustworthy poeple who would not take fright in front of adversities and would resist a variety of pressures. Trembecki’s poem, however, also contained yearning for a forseeable future and nostalgia for what had been lost.

(Nie)przyjemne zabawy wierszem pod okiem redaktora Naruszewicza

Words of Jan Albertrandi which he said in 1770, explaining the reasons for publishing the magazine ‘Zabawy Przyjemne i Pozyteczne’, expressed an enthusiasm about the possibility of achieving by Poles the state of the spiritual and intellectual maturity in a short time. The result of such attitude of the editor was his willingness to provide to potential readers of the magazine the entertainment meeting their expectations, characterizing post‑Sarmatian customs. Quite quickly however in ‘Zabawy…’ there appeared the opinions of people whose point of view was different than that one of Albertrandi, because of their critical assessment of the condition of Polish Enlightenment elites. Perhaps the most important of such voices was a text of very young poet Tomasz Kajetan Wegierski. The significance of his ode ( About disrespect towards learned men ) was largely the result of the fact that it was addressed to Adam Naruszewicz, not only one of the leading figures of the magazine from the very beginning of its existence but also the man being the favourite poet of King Stanislaw August Poniatowski. The undertone of this work was harmonizing, paradoxically, to the meaning of numerous poems, also printed in that time in ‘Zabawy…’, directed against Bar confederates and written in the circle of people close to the king, like Antoni Korwin Kossakowski, the author of the poem entitled To the Nation and Posterity .

A Simple Virgin Speaks: Authorial Identity and Persuasion in Isabella Cervoni's Oration to Pope Clement VIII

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes Isabella Cervoni's Orazione [ … ] al santissimo, e beatissimo padre, e signor nostro, Papa Clemente ottavo, sopra l’impresa di Ferrara, con una canzone [ … ] a’ prencipi cristiani (Bologna: Giovanni Battista Bellagamba, 1598), a bold call to war through which the young female poet strategically inserts her voice into the complex political debate of the 1590s. Cervoni redeploys the words of well-known historians and poets, including Scipione Ammirato and Ludovico Ariosto, to bolster her historically, politically and religiously charged work. She portrays herself as, in turn, a divinely-inspired innocent, an erudite historian, and finally, a prophetic woman poet worthy of both patronage and consideration. This essay also considers Cervoni's unique work within the larger context of other writers who published similar polemics addressed to Pope Clement VIII and other rulers of Europe on the Ottoman threat in the final tumultuous years of the sixteenth century.

Dancing in the Kitchen with Stevens

Dancing in the Kitchen with Stevens Lisa M. Steinman I HAVE TAUGHT Wallace Stevens over a number of years. With one exception, none of the classes in which I taught Stevens’s work were exclusively for poets, although all included promising or beginning writers of poetry. Many of these students—especially when they encountered Stevens’s work in classes that were listed as more academic introductions to modern poetry—expressed occasional discomfort, not knowing how to talk about or “understand” the poems, in particular the earlier anecdote-like poems from Stevens’s first two volumes. Recently, however, I have found more enthusiasm, even if no less anxiety about how to write more academic essays, about the poems; indeed, perhaps I should have titled this short essay “Anecdote of Reading Stevens with Poets.” Reading poems like “Earthy Anecdote” or “Life Is Motion,” I used to face puzzlement or silence, sometimes followed by attempts to theorize the poems, often in a Nietzschean vein or in a symbolic register (with bucks and firecats decoded as reality and imagination, for example) or in historical terms (with attempts to consider Stevens’s imagination of Oklahoma, which became a state only twelve years before “Life Is Motion” was written, in terms of the Indian Removal Act and the 1838–39 Trail of Tears).1 None of these approaches were unreasonable or unprecedented, but neither did such critical frameworks leave students with much to emulate or much to say about lines like “‘Ohoyaho, / Ohoo’ . . .” (CPP 65). However, somewhat to my surprise, I find student-poets are now inclined to focus more on the sonic and rhythmic qualities of the poems: the first response to “Earthy Anecdote” has recently become about the pleasures of mouthing the plosives in “Oklahoma,” “bucks,” “clattering,” and “firecat,” about the materiality of the voiced poem (CPP 3).2 Also to my surprise, a poem that I have in the past avoided teaching (because it is so often used in high-school classes and comes with, as it were, a pre-packaged response), namely “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” is now something my students revisit in ways that do not involve discussions of life and death or imagination and reality. There are still those who point to what they see as the more abstract language of the couplets that conclude each stanza (and especially the repeated refrain), and who then turn, or talk about the way they think readers must turn, to the more intellectual [End Page 159] pleasure of puzzling out what the couplets mean and away from the more embodied pleasure found in the repetitions, assonance, alliteration, rhythm, and rhyme that all but occlude any sense even of a represented scene, so that lines like “In kitchen cups concupiscent curds” exist less to denote the making of dessert than as the occasion of the ephemeral sweetness of saying the words (CPP 50). Issues of representation arise as well: I have students who draw on critics or poets ranging from Roy Harvey Pearce to Helen Vendler to C. S. Giscombe to worry about the depiction of Cuban cigar factory workers, presumably witnessed in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida, during Stevens’s visit there. However, the younger poets’ focus is mostly on the poem’s sound and diction, on something like what Stevens would call the poem’s “essential gaudiness” (L 263). Moreover, it’s not simply the somatic pleasures of patterned sound that are featured in such discussions, but also the exuberance of the imperatives—and, especially, the use of “Let” as a marker of performativity in lines 4, 7, and 15—which momentarily aligns the poem’s act of speech with the original “Let there be light” (especially in line 15: “Let the lamp affix its beam”), yet which first and foremost maintains the kinetic force of the poem’s repetitions (of the imperative verbs, of the etymology linking “imperative” and “emperor,” of the internal and end rhymes of “be,” “be,” “finale,” “seem,” “only,” and “cream”) so that the apparent abstraction of the stanzas’ concluding couplets is absorbed by the patterned sound (CPP 50). In one sense, then, the poem does not elicit intellectual pleasures by means of or set against somatic or...

Droit du Seigneur, Slavery, and Nation in the Poetry of Edward Rushton

THE WEST INDIAN ECLOGUES, EDWARD RUSHTON'S FIRST MAJOR POEM, was published in 1787, one among a spate of other poems designed to rouse moral outrage at Adantic slave trade in English public. Rushton's Eclogues are set in Jamaica and spoken by enslaved Africans taken from their native land. Rushton had personal knowledge of subject: a former sailor in slave trade, he resided several years in West-Indies, and claimed his poems to be painted from actual observation. (1) After contracting ophthalmia while attending to enslaved on a ship and becoming blind in 1770s, Rushton spent rest of his life as a journalist and writer advocating republican and abolitionist beliefs, and agitating for sailors' rights and Irish autonomy. (2) His Eclogues fit into late 1780s political and poetic trends, expressing abolitionist sentiment through revived ancient form of eclogue. They also echoed and significantly amplified a theme broached by young poet: revenge of enslaved. Revenge was an essential theme in early abolitionist poetry, yet it was generally treated indirectly, with varying levels of discomfort. Rushton's poem--in particular fourth and final eclogue--stands out for its comparatively direct treatment of topic of slave revenge, but also for peculiar way in which it ties theme specifically to matter of enslaved women's sexual abuse at hands of slave owners. Rushton would go on to evoke rape in Briton, and Negro Slave in his 1806 Poems, also from point of view of victims' husbands. On this theme, his poetry is connected to a complex network of racialized representations of rape in English, and more broadly, Western literature. Indeed, late eighteenth century saw development of a principally French continental literary trend that invoked droit du seigneur or jus prima noctis--the mythical aristocratic privilege by which a lord could lay sexual claim on any new vassal bride on her wedding night--in order to challenge Ancien Regime social and political hierarchies. Rushton's treatment of rape in his poetry reveals that while much like French droit du seigneur literature it is rooted in a long tradition tying violation of women to collective politics, it also expresses deep unease with which even most progressive European abolitionists considered possibility of black agency in New World. Black resistance was morally justified, but could a responsible white Briton support black revolution? Through Rushton's poetry, I will explore ways in which abolitionists put literary faces on this conundrum, before they had to face it literally in revolution in French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791. Rushton's West Indian Eclogues owe much to Thomas Chatterton's introduction of classical form to abolitionist debate in his African Eclogues of 1770. (3) The form originated in Virgil's Eclogues, itself a dark elaboration on Ancient Greek bucolic genre. Virgil's poem is permeated through and through with portrayals of human infelicity, catastrophic loss, and emotional turbulence reflecting intense social and political turmoil of last years of Roman Republic. (4) Chatterton's African Eclogues emulate Virgil's somber musings, simultaneously operating a drastic shift in focus: whereas Virgil reflected on social upheaval internal to Rome, Chatterton portrays the preying of civilization upon innocent denizens of paradise. (5) Rushton's poems--especially final one in this collection--in turn echo Chatterton's formally and thematically in their focus on people of African descent wronged by Europeans, though he transposes action to a Caribbean locale. In evoking desire for revenge on part of victims of European slave traders, West Indian Eclogues particularly resonate with Chatterton's Heccar and Gaira: An African Eclogue. Chatterton's African warriors are shown recovering from a bloody battle with European enslavers whom they did not manage to stop from abducting their kin, including Gaira's wife Cawna and their children. …

Frost, Stevens, and Me

Frost, Stevens, and Me Rae Armantrout AS IT HAPPENS, neither Wallace Stevens nor Robert Frost was important to me as a young poet. When I was growing up, my mother read me rhymed, metered poetry, which I loved, but by the time I was in high school, I had discovered the modernists and was remaking my ear inspired by the poems and precepts of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. I was fascinated by Emily Dickinson at that time but a bit put off by what I mistakenly thought of as her old-fashioned rhythms. I came to her later, in my late twenties. It took me even longer to begin to appreciate Stevens—but I did. Frost, I fear, will never be for me. Why? I seem to want something from poetry that Frost doesn’t wish to provide. I want poetry to shake up my world or at least the contents of my mind. (“Break on through to the other side” was the theme song of my young adulthood, for better or worse.) Frost appeals to a different impulse. When looking over a selection of his poems in order to begin this essay, I noticed a repeated theme—let’s call it the trope of not going in or not going far. “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep” could be his theme song. In his poem by that title, it sounds as if he is looking down upon the shallow beachgoers who stare at the sea though “The land may vary more” and though “They cannot look out far. / They cannot look in deep. / But when was that ever a bar / To any watch they keep?” (CPPP 274). He appears to accuse the common holidaymaker of being hopelessly superficial. But it is he himself who thinks it best to stay out of the “lovely, dark and deep” woods (CPPP 207), not only in the famous “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” but also in the very similar “Come In,” in which the song of a thrush seemingly invites the poet to “come in / To the dark and lament. // But no, I was out for stars: / I would not come in” (CPPP 304). In both poems, Frost very definitely asserts that there will be no Keatsian swoons for him. He has business to attend to elsewhere. It’s a poetics of restraint, of getting-on-with-it, which lends itself (too?) easily to the status quo of the conformist midcentury. His easily recognized and understood forms are well suited to his themes. I want to jump from Frost’s “Come In” to Stevens’ “Of Mere Being,” another poem “about” a bird and its song. In Stevens’ poem, there is no possible invitation from the bird and no possibility of going into the bird’s world, though we may end by feeling we have been taken there despite [End Page 100] the express impossibility of the journey. That is the paradox at the heart of the poem. Frost’s poem is about what he thinks it best not to do while Stevens’ is about what we humans can’t (or maybe covertly can) do. Thus it is more ambitious. (Though, of course, Frost is ambitious in a different way. He seems to propose his own decisions as an implicit template for the reader’s behavior.) As “Of Mere Being” begins, we are seeing what (logically) we should not be able to see: “The palm at the end of the mind, / Beyond the last thought, rises / In the bronze decor. . . .” Since the palm is “Beyond the last thought,” our decision to approach it or not is moot. The “bronze decor” in which it rises may be either the sunset or (Byzantine) wrought metal, for all we know. We are being asked to imagine the world without ourselves in it. So this is another version of “The Snow Man,” one set in the tropics. It is in this impossible, all too possible tree that “A gold-feathered bird / Sings” a song “without human meaning” (CPP 476). This is somewhat reminiscent of Frost’s “Come In”—there too the bird sang a song that was finally not an invitation. In Frost’s...

Introduction to Focus: Erotic Poetry

Introduction to Focus:Erotic Poetry Anthony Madrid (bio) My guest editorship of this issue of American Book Review began with a modest piece called "Porn Poetry" posted on Paris Review Daily, 16th of August, 2016. There, I complain that we English-speakers have no substantial tradition of erotic poetry in our own language, if we define "erotic poetry" as poetical works whose primary aim is to sexually arouse the reader. My claim was that what we have instead is a small hill of material that might turn somebody on accidentally—merely because sexual themes are touched upon—but whose primary purpose is aggressive, satiric. This line of thought is not easily resisted, I think. Almost all the famous not-safe-for-work poetry in English treats sex as an inherently humbling business, and the nastiness and heartlessness with which the theme is handled reveals—so I asserted—a desire for a kind of revenge on sex itself. Most of my favorite writers are like this. Rochester, Swift, Beckett. I'll put it this way: For most Anglophone writers, "sex" and "piggishness" are near-synonyms. Naturally there are exceptions; I'm saying they're few. In 2002, a friend of mine brought a very special book to my attention. At the time, I was self-medicating with poetry a great deal, as I was preparing for my English Lit oral exams at the University of Chicago. I had a lot of reading to do, and my way of playing hooky from doing it was to type up poems I admired and e-mail them to my friends. The subject line always read "POETRY CHANNEL," along with the poem's title and the author's name and that of the translator (if applicable). Also the date when the piece was written. My admittedly flexible ideal was to send my friends poems they could not possibly have seen otherwise, because the works were, for example, buried in hundred-year-old publications of ethnographic societies, or scholarly books about the place of Buddhism in the poet's life, and so on. Erotic material was not common, but I do remember sending a provocative selection from a book called The Bedbugs' Night Dance and Other Hopi Tales of Sexual Encounter (1995). Somebody might imagine this latter item, drawn from a particularly rich fund of traditional Native American storytelling, would escape my objection about sexually themed literature being so frequently a way of processing anxiety. But that person would be about as wrong as wrong could be. The stories, told in beautiful deadpan, are hilarious precisely because of the ways they make the audience squirm with discomfort. I urge anyone who doubts what I am saying to order the book—it costs nothing, online—and read the story called "Horned Lizard Family." But to get back to the special book my friend recommended. It's called Not Far from the River: Poems from the Gāthā Saptaśati (1990), translated by David Ray. Ian told me about it, not as a remedy for any of the concerns I'm talking about here, but rather simply as a good read for anybody with a lively interest in foreign poetry. The book is a free translation of more than 300 erotic epigrams, originally composed in Mahārāṣṭri Prākṛt, the ancestor of modern Marathi. All the poems are four lines long. They are all about situations and body parts and taxonomy and longing. But mainly situations and body parts. The book fucked me up for life. Over and over I tell young poets: "Please write this book. Or something just like it. Write a book that will do people some actual good. . . ." The main thing is the angle. It's not satirical. The poems are not a way of processing fear and disgust. Instead, each one is simply a generous hand-off to the reader, from the poet, of some gem of erotic imagination. There is no way to do it justice with a few snippets, but I have to give you something: Rare sight, a woman lost in the trance,making love. Beautiful—so long as her eyesremain open, like blue of...

Poesía cubana de cambio de siglo: Anulación de todo meridiano

Cuban poetry tends to be plural, diverse, and dispersed during the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some of the characteristics of the most recent Cuban lyrical writing are related to those authors that were censored by the government during the 60s and the 70s in the island, such as Lina de Feria, Delfin Prats, Isel Rivero, Heberto Padilla, and Reinaldo Arenas. Some of these poets broke the artificial and political (not literary) division between the conversational style and the subjective style. They denounced official communitarianism and the violation of private space. Their poetical tone and their existentialist discourse foreshadow fin de siecle insular poetics. The young Cuban poets that were born from the 70s are very pluralistic. In general, they avoid any affiliation. Their poetry questions the political and cultural tradition. Religiosity, (homo) eroticism, existentialism, metalinguistic concerns, culturalism, irreverence, ahistoricism, and revision of the patriotic traditions are some of the main thematic lines within turn-of-the-century Cuban poetry.

Resisting the Weather: Dragomoshchenko’s Revolution

The work of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, one of the most prominent Russian poets of his generation, is, on the face of it, supremely apolitical. Compared to many of his peers, not to mention younger poets, he hardly ever spoke on political matters; his poetry is even less concerned with politics. And yet, there is every reason to believe that the politics of his poetics is nothing short of revolutionary. This follows directly from Dragomoshchenko’s conviction that language cannot be appropriated and that any claim to language is laughable by definition as it always proceeds through “an idealistic repression of difference and desire in the name of law and equation” (‘Tam. To. Togda’, 1999). This conviction also underlies his own unique strategy of political resistance which he once described as “resisting the weather”. The article attempts to explicate the politics of Dragomoshchenko’s poetry and the ethical consequences of his political strategy through a close reading of his poem ‘Politiku’ (‘To a Statesman’) and several other texts included in his last poetry collection Tavtologiia (Tautology).

Allegory of Good Government

Allegory of Good Government Maura Stanton (bio) after the frescos of Ambrogio Lorenzetti Peace lounges in her see-through negligee,a soldier's uniform rolled under the pillowthat props her elbow, both her feet bareas if there's nothing to do now exceptslumber a bit, then get up and dance.Near her on the ornate brocade sofa,Fortitude looks wistful, clenching a staff,while Prudence in a veil is making lace—or is she plucking a zither? Hard to tell.Three other women sit on another sofa,one holding a basket, one an hourglass,and one a sword—and on her knee, Wow!the severed male head she's just cut off:Magnanimity, Temperance, and Justice,these three are called, all six womenparts of the allegory of Good Governmenton the walls of the Palazzo Publicohere in Siena, in the Hall of the Ninewhere I'm so glad to escape the heatI'm spending time looking at the detailsI might brush past if it were cooler out.This scene—it could be my own familygathered at my mother's house in the '90sto celebrate someone's birthday or promotion,sisters and sisters-in-law crowded togetherdrinking fizzy pink wine and gossipingabout friends, co-workers, or a bad bosswho probably looked a lot like that headbalanced on its ear, the hair mussed upbecause Justice has tugged off its gold crownand keeps it nestled in her lap for safekeeping. [End Page 187] But when I turn I see the other wall.The horned Tyrant of Bad Governmentlooms from the damaged fresco, his feet proppedon the goat of Luxury. He's got sofas, too,for friends and family, with lots of roomfor Cruelty, Deceit, and charming Fraudwho looks like an angel—with claws, not feet.On his left side the beast Fury pranceswhile clever Division works her tool,and War's dressed in the armor that Peacethinks she's hidden under her tasseled pillow.Siena's a ruin, houses tumbling down,no one at work except the armorer,and no one on the streets except Justice,in her red gown, shield up, her sword gone,getting arrested by men in peaked hatswho drag her off to the right of the fresco.That's her again, stripped of her gown,tied up by the feet, head down, arms bound. Another tourist bumps me so I move onto the Cappella dei Signoriwhere I try to distract my uneasy thoughtsby looking up at the vaulted ceilingthat Taddeo di Bartolo painted after the plague.Here, thirty-two angels play instruments,dancing as they ripple, blow, or beattheir antique horns and harps and tambourines,their double flutes and lutes the size of melons.You can almost hear them, someone cries,and I almost can as I look at their delightin kicking the ether, held up by bright wings.And passing back through the Hall of the NineI glance again at Peace. She hears them, too,one foot tapping to their heavenly musicas she sprawls on Good Government's sofawishing she could fall asleep. But she can't.Like a TV screen flickering forever,Bad Government's unfolding on the other wall,as fools and phantoms emerge yet againthrough damaged plaster to delude and spoil. [End Page 188] Maura Stanton Maura Stanton's first book of poetry, Snow on Snow (1975), was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. She has published five other books of poetry, including Life Among the Trolls (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998) and Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois Press, 2008), as well as a novel and three books of short stories. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hudson Review, Yale Review, Upstreet, Cincinnati Review, Baltimore Review, Measure, Numero Cinq, and the Golden Shovel Anthology. Her story "Oh Shenandoah," published in NER, won an O. Henry Award in 2014. Copyright © 2017 Middlebury College Publications

House Nigga’s Clean Finish

House Nigga’s Clean Finish Airea D. Matthews (bio) Racing toward the big house, I made a pactto bear off the moon’s open-mouthed gawp, learn to make my own light from the glintof rot mouth, gristle and white-fat. Fire helps make what don’t matter, matter less. Nothingto it, really: roots in a cup and the sea-deep sleep. Master slaps and drinks and gnaws. Always do.Playing a sinchase I wasn’t made to run or win. Master snags, lays his body’s burden across, slower underthis spell. He lull like Lazarus and I become Martha, wail to Jesus and undress his bones. I dig my coffin-shaped nails through his temple, knife-free my scent from his fingers, wrassle flesh from loin, haul his shellover my split back like ruined linen purged in coal, ready for the sweet by-and-by under night’s godless cloak.At break of dawn when the bought niggas pray and ache the absence of an ordinary lord, I remind their God:Had you ever been here, this Lazarus would not have died. [End Page 30] Airea D. Matthews Airea D. Matthews, a resident of Detroit, is the winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets for her manuscript collection entitled Simulacra, which Yale University Press will publish in 2017. She is both a Cave Canem and a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow. Her poetry and prose have appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, such as Best American Poetry 2015, Indiana Review, Muzzle, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Callaloo. In addition to serving as executive editor of the Offing, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, she is employed as the Assistant Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she earlier received the MFA in creative writing. Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

An Appalachian Heritage Interview: Maurice Manning

An Appalachian Heritage InterviewMaurice Manning Marianne Worthington (bio) Maurice Manning lives both in and apart from the world. On one hand, he is actively engaged with his own farm and is a vocal environmentalist and activist. He is a respected writer and teacher in local, regional, and national writing communities. On the other hand, he eschews any type of social media and can only bear to look at the news "just long [End Page 47] enough to know what is going on." As a poet he is passionate about using language as a way to articulate and assign meaning to experiences, and yet he often isolates himself from worldly concerns while writing. Even his office on the busy campus of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, is located in a small tract house that sits on the edge of campus, away from the main buildings and gathering spots of campus life. Manning's first book of poems, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions (2001), was chosen by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His other collections are A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Lone Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c. (2004), Bucolics (2007), The Common Man (2010)—a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize—and The Gone and the Going Away (2013). In late 2016, his sixth collection of poems, One Man's Dark, was published by Copper Canyon Press. Manning serves as professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Transylvania and lives with his wife and daughter on twenty wooded acres in a 165-year-old farmhouse in Washington County, Kentucky, about fifteen miles from the city of Danville, Kentucky, where he was raised. A Guggenheim Fellow, Pulitzer finalist, and winner of many other prizes and fellowships, Manning also teaches regularly in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and at the annual Sewanee Writers' Conference. He talked with his friend and fellow poet Marianne Worthington in that Transylvania office on a sunny afternoon in mid-September about his latest book of poems, the importance of craft in poetry, and the role of the artist in society. [End Page 48] ________ Click for larger view View full resolution photo: Steve Cody Maurice Manning [End Page 49] MARIANNE WORTHINGTON: One Man's Dark has been summarized as "elegant pastorals" that combine the "corporeal and the spiritual." Likewise, another critic said the collection "emphasizes human beings' dependence on both nature and the divine, and thus the book is filled with poignant descriptions of nature's beauty… as well as with explicit references to God…" Were these ideas what you had in mind while you were writing the poems? MAURICE MANNING: When I was working on the poems, my thinking was to work from a recurrent set of images. All of that was intentional on my part, and there's a motion to that because it is repetitive. And the writing style of this book is dense and repetitive in a way that a blackberry bramble is dense and stuck together. Or, in our region of the country when you look out at the hills, it's hard to tell when one hill ends and another begins. That sense of inter-connection, of inter-weaving, there's a motion and flow to that as well; there's a continuity in the landscape. I feel like this book is attempting to get hold of that, and I wanted the writing to parallel that. MW: And what about the notion of the dream motif that also recurs throughout One Man's Dark? MM: Actually, I would find myself writing many of the poems in my sleep. It's been rare when I've had an experience like that. MW: Could you remember the poems when you woke up? MM: Yes. I could remember lines. I could remember images. Certainly rhythms. And there was a point where, in the several years that I was working on the poems, it didn't matter to me [End Page 50] to make a distinction between reality, memory, or dream. They all seemed to be flowing in and out of each other in a way that parallels what I was...

Now All Mistakes Conspire, and: Between the Shore and the Open Water

Now All Mistakes Conspire, and: Between the Shore and the Open Water Carl Phillips (bio) NOW ALL MISTAKES CONSPIRE It’s almost starting to ring true again, about fear being the sturdiest bond possible betweenany two people: I’ve never beenso frightened; I’ve never feltmore close. You make shelter—I mean the kindthe mind sometimes misses especially—seem noharder to find than those stranded-looking nests I seeeverywhere, now the orchard’s leaveshave all but finished falling, what’s a nestanyway, but a weaving together of stray weeds,lost remnants found, whatever jetsam mightmean here—something, I hope, though the sea’sfar away—what’s shelter, anyway, if notonly for now, while we need it. You’ll have seen howthe present tends at once to eclipse and reinforce the past. What’s the more usefulquestion, though—how? or why? Sometimes, whenthe backdrop of winter sky behind the trees’bare branches goes red at sunset,I think equally of stained glass and of one thingmaking up for another—and I can’tdecide. Is the most difficult part of lovewhat can look like the simplest part—staying,when love as a fixed requirementdisappears, and no one asks where it went to? Oras with certain ones of the wilder animals,for whom superior power comessecond, finally, to discernment, being ableto pinpoint the enemy’s weakness and withneither warning nor thought exploit it—what if that’s it? [End Page 33] BETWEEN THE SHORE AND THE OPEN WATER What injures the hiveinjures the bee, says MarcusAurelius. I say not wantingto hurt another, this late,should maybe more thancount, still, as a formof love— skull of an ox, from which a smattering of stars keeps rising . . . Did you knowthere’s an actual plantcalled honesty—for its seedpods,how you can see straight through.Who I am. And how I treated you,and how you feel. Tell me everything. [End Page 34] Click for larger view View full resolution Rigoberto Gonzalez, Sharon Olds, and Carl Phillips Photograph courtesy of Nicholas Nichols Click for larger view View full resolution Airea D. Matthews and Rigoberto Gonzalez Photograph courtesy of Nicholas Nichols [End Page 35] Click for larger view View full resolution Yusef Komunyakaa, just before receiving a Callaloo Lifetime Achievement Award Photograph courtesy of Nicholas Nichols [End Page 36] Click for larger view View full resolution Gregory Pardlo Photograph courtesy of Jerriod Avant Click for larger view View full resolution A rapt audience at NYU. Photograph courtesy of Stacy Parker Le Melle [End Page 37] Carl Phillips Carl Phillips, poet and essayist, is Professor of English at Washington University (St. Louis), where he formerly served as Director of the Creative Writing Program. He is currently the judge for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Included among his twelve volumes of poems and two books of essays are Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986–2006 (2007), Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry (2004), Speak Low (2009), Silverchest (2013), The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (essays, 2014), and Reconnaissance (2015), winner of the PEN Center USA 2016 Literary Award for Poetry. In 2004, Oxford University Press published his translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Phillips, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the National Book Award, has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, for which he served as a Chancellor (2006–2012). His other honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

Comedias varias. Volumen 3.1: Morir y disimular, Gravedad en Villaverde, La más constante mujer by Juan Pérez de Montalbán

Reviewed by: Comedias varias. Volumen 3.1: Morir y disimular, Gravedad en Villaverde, La más constante mujer by Juan Pérez de Montalbán Sidney Donnell Juan Pérez de Montalbán. Comedias varias. Volumen 3.1: Morir y disimular, Gravedad en Villaverde, La más constante mujer. Edición de Claudia Demattè, David Arbesú y Philip Allen. Edition Reichenberger, 2016. 356 Pp. CLAUDIA DEMATTÈ DIRECTS THE SERIES Obras de Juan Pérez de Montalbán, which consists of critical editions of works by this celebrated author from the early seventeenth century. The present volume, Comedias varias, 3.1, is the first in the series to include three plays that never appeared in the official collected works that Montalbán and his father, Madrid bookseller Alonso Pérez, authorized for publication in 1635 and 1638. Morir y disimular, Gravedad en Villaverde, and La más constante mujer are edited and introduced, respectively, by Demattè, David Arbesú, and Philip Allen. Arbesú provides the volume’s general introduction, briefly situating this installment in relation to the remainder of the series and, immediately thereafter, placing each of the three plays in relation to Montalbán’s oeuvre in general. As Arbesú explains, Morir y disimular (circa 1618) is possibly the very first three-act play the young dramatist ever wrote, Gravedad en Villaverde (circa 1624–25) is an adaptation of his exemplary novel La villana de Pinto (1624), and La más constante mujer (1632) is one of Montalbán’s most successful plays in terms of public and critical acclaim. Demattè’s, Arbesú’s, and Allen’s respective prologues provide concise explanations as to the provenance of Morir y disimular, Gravedad en Villaverde, and La más constante mujer and include detailed plot summaries, stemmata indicating the text’s transmission, and summaries of the metrical composition of the play texts. Works are presented in chronological order, and spelling is modernized following the standard practice among editors in the field. The volume’s editors discreetly limit their use of footnotes to clarifying usage (idioms and parlance unique to the early modern period), to explaining historical and literary references, and to elucidating published variants of [End Page 189] verse. The volume concludes with an index of footnote references (in lieu of a glossary) and a complete bibliography. The main body of the volume opens with Demattè’s introduction to her critical edition of Montalbán’s earliest play, Morir y disimular. The scholar offers a short yet well-documented discussion of the date of composition of the work, the general literary milieu in which the young poet grew and thrived, and the emblematic writing style that appears in this and his other plays. In this last respect, Demattè convincingly supports Montalbán’s authorship of this comedia heroica due to his frequent and keen use of metatextual references, irony, and other rhetorical devices characteristic of his corpus. In this regard, the critic correctly notes that Morir y disimular echoes plays by Montalbán’s chief mentor, Lope de Vega. In her philological study, Demattè rightly takes a moment to pay homage to the Modern Language Association’s efforts in 1938 to microfilm a large number of works (including a rare suelta edition of Morir y disimular) that were housed in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin and subsequently lost during the Second World War. Arbesú introduces the volume’s second full-length dramatic work, Gravedad en Villaverde. He summarizes scholarly debate as to the play’s authorship and settles on Victor Dixon’s definitive argument connecting the play text to its primary source, Montalbán’s exemplary novel La villana de Pinto. In addition to including a full plot summary of Gravedad en Villaverde, Arbesú compares Montalbán’s dramatic adaptation in verse with its earlier rendering in prose. The heroine of this tale of mistaken identity, which concludes with her romantic union with a nobleman, has a much more explicit origin story in Montalbán’s exemplary novel than in his play. A farmer (the young woman’s adoptive father) encounters a noblewoman (the heroine’s biological mother) who is about to kill her illegitimate baby (the future heroine). The farmer intervenes and adopts...

Introduction

Introduction Kaveh Akbar I didn't want to write an intro to this memorial. I thought it important Franz's be the first voice a reader encountered. His five new poems included here are extraordinary—incantatory, magisterial, impossibly charming even in their desolation. The first time I read them I became predictably emotional—like countless others, I've desperately missed his voice. Huge chunks of his later books seem written explicitly to steel his beloveds in his absence, but in these new pieces his voice comes across the actual beyond to speak to us of stillness and solitude and wild strawberries and so much more. I'm getting goosebumps now just typing about them. I think Franz's work and everyone else's work here stands on its own, from his wife Elizabeth's wrenching recollections of their long marriage to David Young's stunningly earnest essay about his and Franz's extraordinary relationship to all the other poems and prose written about or for or to or through Franz by people who loved him or loved his work. So why then am I writing this? To say, briefly, that in the one month this memorial was open for submissions, I got hundreds upon hundreds of poems, essays, letters, and tributes sent to me to consider for the space. They came in from all over the world, from writers and non-writers alike. In almost every single submission I got, there was a story about a seminal interaction with Franz, virtual or in the real world. Dozens of people wrote to tell me about correspondences with Franz about poetry, about life, about addiction, about baseball. Even more wrote about quiet mentorships spanning months or years or decades, mentorships for which Franz never accepted a penny. The theme throughout all these correspondences was this—for all his well-documented struggles living the life of a semi-public intellectual while simultaneously battling serious mental and physical illnesses, Franz devoted an astonishingly large percentage of his psychic and temporal resources to nurturing and encouraging young poets. He may have earned some infamy for burning bridges in the academic and literary spheres, but he was constantly erecting new ones privately, quietly, out of the spotlight, with young and unestablished writers who had nothing to offer him but their poems and their sincere gratitude. It would be impossible for me to account for all these stories in this space, but it feels important to me that I at least make mention of their existence. The memorial aims to preserve the legacy of Franz's life in poetry, and it's become abundantly evident to me that a central part of that legacy is the substantial investment Franz made in the future of poetry. Any thorough consideration of his contribution to American letters must consider both his singular body of poetry and his lifelong practice of supporting poets. —Kaveh Akbar [End Page 155] Copyright © 2017 Pleiades and Pleiades Press