Erica Wright

Wednesday's Poem: Wake Up, Sleepyhead

Yesterday I awoke to newsletters from Boston Review and The Kenyon Review, both announcing poems by Catherine Pierce. (While it was a good morning for me, it must have been an even better one for this Famous Last Words author.) I enjoyed both, but I am declaring “Dear Day,” this week’s poem because its embrace of challenges made me think, yes, I did do the right thing by crawling out from between my flannel sheets.

In this poem, Pierce imagines the day as a monster, complete with pincers and scales. We all know those days, of course, and how wonderful to recognize the potential adventure instead of the potential misfortune. How wonderful to say, “maybe, we’ll bullet together into forests / and glades and gladness. So stay.” This poem is a vehicle of joy, the kind you might consider printing and taping to your nightstand. It might even lure you and your pet monster out from under the covers.

“Dear Day,” originally appeared in the January/February 2012 issue of Boston Review.

 

A Face to Meet the Faces

A couple of weeks ago, my students and I had a rousing conversation about Patricia Smith's poem "Skinhead." In addition to the challenges of writing about race, we talked about the potential power of persona poems, what heights or depths the mask offers the poet. What a pleasant surprise to then find A Face to Meet the Faces in my mailbox this week. This anthology of contemporary persona poems features the work of more than two hundred contemporary poets, including Smith. While reading the table of contents, I was delighted to see the titles of many favorite poems such as "I am the Real Jesse James" by Sarah Messer and an excerpt from "Musica Humana" by Ilya Kaminsky. I'd like to think that I registered these as persona poems when I first encountered them, but who knows. Despite my admiration for "Skinhead," when faced with the term "dramatic monologue," I typically think of "My Last Duchess" and, let's face it, stifle a yawn. And yet here are some of my favorite, decidedly un-boring poems all together in one place like they're having a party!

What I'm saying is that this anthology, edited by Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz, will alter your perception of the persona poem. These selections know how to dance, and I am honored to have a poem included alongside so many great poets, including my friend Billy Merrell whose daring poem "Nabokov, Naming the Animals" explains, "He gave the world its first / Question Mark, first Small Postman, // First Harvester. Nabokov's butterflies unfurled, / And he never grew tired of them." You'll feel the same way about this anthology.

 

Wednesday’s Poem: For President’s Week, Teddy Roosevelt’s Dead Animals

It would be a lie to say that taxidermy doesn’t interest me. When I think about leaving New York City, a sudden panic grips my chest: What will I do without the Natural History Museum? Those grizzlies and antelope and elephants. Elephants! I have spent many an afternoon musing about the master taxidermists who were hired to complete the dioramas. How proud they must have been to finish each moose, each mountain goat. There’s the scale of the project, yes, but they were also serving their country since the museum was one of Teddy’s pet (hearty har har) projects.

Less skilled is the hero of Sierra DeMulder’s poem “The Genius Performs Taxidermy” who, we are told in the opening line, “did minimal research.” Even taking at face value that the man is a genius, this doesn’t bode well. Who learns the great science-art of taxidermy from a book? There’s a powerful directness to DeMulder’s language. She chooses the plainspoken over the elaborate, and the surprising result is that we feel empathy instead of disgust at this process of preserving dead things. 

“The Genius Performs Taxidermy” originally appeared in Issue Seventeen of < kill author.

 

Wednesday's Poem: The Gentleman and the Translator

I found this week’s poem, “Frustration Translation” by Sophie Grimes, after reading AGNI Editor Sven Birkerts’s thoughtful essay on the slush pile. In this piece, he explains his method, which begins with parking his car and ends with dividing poems and stories into two piles: rejected and not. Despite (Because of?) his somewhat rueful tone, Birkerts comes across as nothing short of a gentlemen. I cannot, for example, imagine him taking over an editing position and un-accepting poems. And while he may only spend a minute on each submission during an initial reading, I bet many writers would rather his minute than a lesser editor’s fifteen.

I like to think of Birkerts in his ziggurat-filled office stumbling across Grimes’s striking “Frustration Translation.” This poem captures the elation and, yes, frustration of translation. I have only experienced the latter in my feeble attempts, but Grimes conveys the joy so convincingly that I get to experience it alongside her. She gives us a glimpse into the thought process of a translator: “The orphan lamp. No, the lonely light. / That’s not right: the isolated lantern of the not yet sunken moon.” Translator, poet, or neither, “That’s not right” is a thought many of us had while attempting a daunting task.

“Frustration Translation” includes the note “After Han Shan.” Han Shan may or may not have been a 9^th century Chinese poet who may or may not have lived to 120. Whatever the truth, poems credited to him exist, and could Grimes perhaps be translating them? If her translations are as meticulous as her poems, we can only hope.

“Frustration Translation” appeared recently in AGNI Online.

 

 

Transcending Multiculturalism: A Review of Love and Strange Horses

I reviewed Nathalie Handal's disarming Love and Strange Horses in Issue 17 of Poetry International. The ambition of this collection is perhaps the purest that lyric poetry claims, that of music's immediacy. As the poet asks in "The Songmaker—19 Arabics," "Who said we need to be strangers, / when we listen to the same music?" 

More than any other journal, Poetry International surprises me with its panoply of writers. There is always someone, often many someones, new to discover. At $15, this six-hundred page issue of Poetry International is a steal.

Wednesday's Poem: Don’t Leave the Squirrel Alone for Long

Roseanne Carrara’s poem “Curses” taps into that superstitious elf in all of us. You know the one. You’re merrily going about your day until a crow alights on your windowsill. You look outside, frantically hoping to see more black wings because while two crows means marriage, one means imminent doom. Or maybe crows don’t bother you. Maybe it’s toasting with an empty glass or passing underneath a ladder. Wherever that illogical shiver comes from, it’s hard to shake.

In “Curses,” Carrara addresses interior rather than exterior omens, the ones that come from poor decisions not chance encounters. What happens, she asks, when presented with an opportunity to do a good deed, you don’t? Or, to reference Joan Didion’s “On Morality,” what happens if you leave a dead body by the road as a coyote chew toy? In Carrara’s poem, the body belongs to a squirrel, and “curses” means something like “dread.”

The poet perfectly captures the guilt that shadows us when we make the wrong decision. The poem begins, “Do not be surprised if, having been asked to perform / some service or ceremony, and flying from it, you / have your turn with curses.” Briefly, I misremembered the title of this poem as “Self-Preservation,” and there’s something of that, too. It suggests you bury that squirrel to avoid getting your “comeuppance.” Carrara’s use of humor serves the poem well, tempering what could become didactic. Instead, these lines offer possibilities, not absolutes, and the result is an engaging meditation on our fears, warranted or not.  

“Curses” appeared in the most recent issue of Harp & Altar.

(Elf houses!) 

 

Wednesday's Poem: Go Little Fish, Go

Anna Lowe Weber’s poem “All We Didn’t Know We Didn’t Know” is surprising in its intimacy. Her “we” feels genuine as if, yes indeed, we are “all of us saints of something.” Or, at least, we used to be. This sonnet is imbued with nostalgia; it highlights those magical properties of youth (not looks but imaginations) that we don’t know to value at the time. The religious undercurrent feels right, too, especially the way in which we sometimes can’t control thoughts or prayers. I won’t spoil the ending by quoting it, but I’ve never seen such a little fish go so far. You’ll root for him, too.

“All We Didn’t Know We Didn't Know” was published in the latest issue of Boxcar Poetry Review.