🌬️ Poems
🌬️ Currently reading: The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imaginat… by Wallace Stevens 📚
Wallace Stevens correctly weighs that it is a poet’s duty to hold the interdependence of reality and imagination. Fully living in both, as a poet’s job and task, is to help people to live their lives.
Reality is things as they are, and imagination presses back against the pressures of that said reality.
>“This has to do with our self-preservation… the sound of its words helps us to live our lives. [A poet] cannot be a charioteer traversing vacant space, however ethereal, he must have lived all of the last two thousand years, and longer, he must have instructed himself, as best he could, as he went along… imagination gives to everything it touches a peculiarity, and it seems to me that the peculiarity of the imagination is nobility, of which there are many degrees.”
🌬️ Thoughts on Elisabeth Camp's "Metaphor and That Certain 'Je Ne Sais Quoi'"
In Camp’s essay “Metaphor and That Certain ‘Je Ne Sais Quoi'” she breaks down why Juliet is the sun brings up a kaleidoscope of emotions and stays in the collective Poetry memory. I specifically love that Camp thinks through why this open-ended, some might even call it vague, metaphor actually works differently than we usually assume.
Often in teaching poetry, or being taught it, it’s easy to say “make the metaphor more precise or, just make it stranger”. Truthfully, we are all in fear of cliché, and T.S. Eliot has scared us into staying clear from abstraction… Yet Camp argues that the open-endedness is closer to what she elsewhere calls a frame: the metaphor asks you to see Juliet through the sun, importing a whole perspective, an organizing lens rather than swapping in a checklist of shared attributes.
What I find most useful is her point that any literal paraphrase inevitably turns the metaphor into a list: beautiful, hot, life-giving, natural, central, orbital, and a list is closed the moment you finish writing it, while a lens keeps generating new observations the longer you look through it.
That’s is probably the sharpest argument against “precision” as the goal: precision is a property of propositions, not of ways of seeing!
She also talks about metaphor’s twofold quality, meaning, you’re suppose to hold Juliet is like the sun and Juliet is not the sun at once. I think that unresolved doubleness might be where real strangeness comes from, rather than from just picking a more surprising vehicle. And she notes the frame doesn’t let you cherry-pick the flattering parts, there is a darkness inside the frame, invoking the sun also drags in the danger of staring too long, whether or not Romeo meant to say that. Once you invoke a frame, it has a mind of its own!
🌬️ Still beaming to have been part of such a generous & kind group of poets. All thanks to the PSA and Lynn Melnick for stitching together a solid cohort. The goal was that we would stay connected and invested in each other’s work from here on out, and I have no doubt that will be so! Excited to see where everyone goes and what they do.
🌬️ New poem published! Thank you to the Poetry Society of America for selecting my poem, “And Even You, With Your Lucky Breaks” for their storefront prize & big congrats to the other poets selected. My poem will be on display for the entire month of August on Smith Street in Brooklyn.
You can read more about the selection, the other winners, and my poem here.
🌬️ Grateful to Brooklyn Poets for the finalist mention for their Summer Fellowship. Congrats to everyone! And I’m excited to see what work comes from the fellows!
🌬️ Excited and very into this visual poem by Eugenia Leigh in Poetry Mag: “Oh I Thought You Knew, She Said, Dad Is Alive”
🌬️ New poem published!
Thanks to Nadia and the whole Thimble Literary Magazine team for publishing in both print & on the world wide web my poem “Now and Later” in their summer issue (the cover looks amazing!!). Print copies are available next weekend but you can view the issue here.
Without spoiling the magic, I’ll say two things: one) this poem feels like it was given to me. Meaning, I needed it more than it needed me. And two) the last line was written first, which also makes it a certain type of given.
Finished reading: Obit by Victoria Chang 📚
>🌬️
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>“What if we call the waiter over and God comes instead?”
Excerpt from Letters to a Young Poet
🌬️
>“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
>“Do not write a poetry of rarity, or of rarification, but of never again.” - Kevin Young 🌬️
🌬️ Poem: Nothing in That Drawer by Ron Padgett
One of my favorite sonnets –
>Nothing in That Drawer
>Ron Padgett
>
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
>Nothing in that drawer.
🌬️ Poem: [Sonnet] You jerk you didn't call me up By Bernadette Mayer
>[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up
>By Bernadette Mayer
>
>You jerk you didn’t call me up
>I haven’t seen you in so long
>You probably have a fucking tan
>& besides that instead of making love tonight
>You’re drinking your parents to the airport
>I’m through with you bourgeois boys
>All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts
>Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but
>
>Nowadays you guys settle for a couch
>By a soporific color cable t.v. set
>Instead of any arc of love, no wonder
>The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time
>
>Wake up! It’s the middle of the night
>You can either make love or die at the hands of the Cobra Commander
>
>
>_________________
>
>To make love, turn to page 121.
>To die, turn to page 172.
🌬️ Poem: I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again By Vievee Francis
>I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again
>By Vievee Francis
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>Those who live to have it and
>those who live to give it.
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>Of course there are those for whom both are true,
>but never in the same measure.
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>Those who have it to give are
>like cardinals in the snow. So easy
>and beautifully lit. Some
>are rabbits. Hard to see
>except for those who would prey upon them:
>all that softness and quaking and blood.
>
>
>Those who want it
>cannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and such talons,
>any furred thing will do. So easy
>to rip out a heart when it is throbbing so hard.
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>
>I wander out into the winter.
>I know what I am.
🌬️ Poem: I Love by Jacques-Bernard Brunius
It’s the week of Valentine’s Day, and I’m having my undergraduate students write sonnets and explore the magical love poem (or anti-love poem).
I often look to surrealist poets when it comes to passion, eroticism, and love poems because love is often a resistance to logic and sense-making. Surrealism in poetry does have sense if you read with all your senses.
Here is a surreal love poem from the French Surrealist poet Jacques-Bernard Brunius:
> I Love
>
> I love sliding I love upsetting everything
> I love coming in I love sighing
> I love taming the furtive manes of hair
> I love hot I love tenuous
> I love supple I love infernal
> I love sugared but elastic the curtain of springs turning to glass
> I love pearl I love skin
> I love tempest I love pupil
> I love benevolent seal long-distance swimmer
> I love oval I love struggling
> I love shining I love breaking
> I love the smoking spark silk vanilla mouth to mouth
> I love blue I love known—knowing
> I love lazy I love spherical
> I love liquid beating drum sun if it wavers
> I love to the left I love in the fire
> I love because I love at the edges
> I love forever many times just one
> I love freely I love especially
> I love separately I love scandalously
> I love similarly obscurely uniquely
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> hopingly
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> I love I shall love
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> Translated by Mary Ann Caws
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