7 February 2010
Nick Lantz, “Lacuna, Triptych of the Battle”
Categories: poetry |
First Panel
A confusion of soldiers—the guide counts
for us ten helmeted heads but twenty-five
boots—cramped below the castle wall.
Are they mustering for a surge or balking
just beyond the archers’ reach?Second Panel
Ripped away, only a skirt of paint hemming
top and bottom, forty-seven boots kissing,
toe-to-toe. At the top, a ribbon of sky, a broken
spearhead hangs loose in the air, like an iron
falcon folded to drop. So rare, says the guide,
for motion to be conveyed this way.Third Panel
An army victorious, but high on the flagpole
its standard has been pried away for its gold
enamel, so who can say which army
it is, invader or defender? The guide smiles,
points to the missing triangle. This theft
too, he says, is hundreds of years
old. This theft too is part of history.
Nick Lantz’s debut collection of poems, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize; the University of Wisconsin Press will be publishing a second collection, The Lightning That Strikes the Nieghbors’ House, in April. You may recognize the title of this first book as the tail end of a famous statement by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about known knowns and unknown unknowns; the collection also includes poems like “Of the Parrat and other birds that can speake.”
Lantz has also won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. And he’s on Twitter, posting a new original poem every day—as he explains, “140 characters… makes for a nice formal restriction.”
19 January 2010
Tony Hoagland, “Field Guide”
Categories: poetry |
Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious element of all,I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the waterat the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,hovered over it, then it, and rested.
That’s all.I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a pagein certain library books,
so that the reader will knowwhere to look for the good parts.
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty is the fourth collection from Tony Hoagland. Other poems in this book include “At the Galleria Shopping Mall” (since retitled “At the Galleria”) and “Personal” (from Poetry), “Confinement” (from Slate), and “Romantic Moment,” which Hoagland read at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival.
“I think that I got deeper and deeper into the world of poetry simply because it was the only thing that stayed constant in my life continuously, year after year, and then decade after decade,” Hoagland told an interviewer during that same festival. “I couldn’t seem to sustain continuity in any of the other typical realms of life: in relationships, in education, and the idea of a career path was simply laughable to me. But poetry was always there, and I remained engaged in reading it… Poetry—poems themselves—became a culture for me, a culture that I carried with me.”
20 April 2009
Ruth Padel, “Tropical Forest”
Categories: poetry |
British poet Ruth Padel came to New York City recently, and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to meet with her to talk about her latest book, Darwin: A Life in Poems. In this short video segment, she explains why, although she’s written about nature throughout her literary career, in both verse and memoir, this is the first time she’s really focused on her great-great-grandfather, Charles Darwin. Then, a poem about his wife, Emma.
Perhaps, after all, the angel was not wounded.
Kingdoms of his life rearranged themselves like cloud
after a storm. He felt washed open—an oyster
cleansed of grit. Marine metaphors flowed over him
as when he paced the deck of the little lone Beagle
at night. He felt loose, like a runaway cartwheel
bouncing from the heights into a valley
of violet oak trees. They stood
silent in the drawing-room, surprised.
She’d be engineer of all his happiness. Bees
shifted honey-bags up his spine. He was roses
burning alive, and she was the haze
above tropical forest plus the unfathomed riches
within. Like giving to a blind man eyes.
Tomorrow, I’ll share another short video with you, as well as the questions I asked after I put the camera down. In the meantime, you might want to read a NY Times profile by Charles McGrath, who took her to the Museum of Natural History.
17 April 2009
Michael Hofmann, “On the Beach at Thorpeness”
Categories: poetry |
I looked idly right for corpses in the underbrush,
then left, to check that Sizewell was still there.
The wind was from that quarter, northeasterly, a seawind,
B-wind, from that triune reliable fissile block.—It blackened the drainage ditches
on the low coastal plain, blew up a dry tushing rustle
from the liberal-democratic Aesopian bullrushes,
and an ill-tempered creaking from Christian oaks…A set of three-point lion prints padded up the beach.
The tideline was a ravel of seaweed and detritus,
a red ragged square of John Bull plastic,
a gull’s feather lying down by a fish-spine.The North Sea was a yeasty, sudsy brown slop.
My feet jingled on the sloping gravel,
a crisp musical shingle. My tracks were oval holes
like whole notes or snowshoes or Dover soles.Roaring waves of fighters headed back to Bentwaters.
The tide advanced in blunt cod’s-head curves,
ebbed through the chattering teeth of the pebbles.
Jaw jaw. War war.
Selected Poems was assembled from four Michael Hofmann collections published between 1983 and 1999, along with seven new poems. In the last decade, he has focused primarily on translating German literature, including works by Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Stamm, and Joseph Roth (as well as his father, Gert Hofmann). Last year, he explained his poetic silence to The Independent: “I did feel from the mid-90s on that poems had a harder time getting out of me. I think my self-censoring has got much stronger, and poems that might have appeared are often strangled.”
