​Below are couplets I’ve translated from the French of Fernand Moutet, Pareil au Feu Couvert (Paris: Éditions Points & Counterpoints, 1970). He was a Provençal poet who died in 1993.


Your role is clear: against the window throw a stone,
Poet, and cry out that the sky has just been born.

*****

The kiss of Sappho, this mythic sun,
I know it well: Margot gave me one.

*****

Old man, sing again, we beg you: a beech
Struck by lightning burns with beautiful heat.

*****

The gods—invisible? Yes, but in his prison
The convict can still remember the horizon.

Posted 31 March 2025. Send comments to [email protected].

New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry “features work that renews the ancient affinities among poetry, song, and story.” The first issue was released in the summer of 2024. The founding editor is Steven Knepper, the Bruce C. Gottwald, Jr. ’81 Chair for Academic Excellence in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, VA. Knepper is also an associate editor for the Robert Frost Review, a writer of metrical poems, and author of books on two contemporary philosophers, William Desmond and Byung-Chul Han. NVR is a personal endeavor of the editor and is not affiliated with VMI.

Over the past few days, I have been reading the poems in the latest number, Winter 2025, with the goal of writing a brief appreciation. Here I will focus on the short lyric and narrative poems, excluding the translations, the excerpts from longer works, and the critical essay by Elijah Perseus Blumov, “The Iron Lyre: Poetry, Heavy Metal, and the New Sublime.” All told, approximately sixty-six poems by fifty-five poets fall within the scope of my appreciation.

As an appreciation, this essay is personal, from the standpoint of a practicing writer and reader of poetry with a growing attachment to formal poetry. I still read and write free verse, but often enough I will take a promising but unfinished free verse poem and turn it into formal verse. Writing becomes a sort of game, usually an entertaining one, though sometimes I want to knock over the board and send the pieces flying. The variety and richness of formal poetry in this issue of NVR introduce many new games and remind me of some I’ve neglected.

In reading these poems and in pondering my recent experiences in writing formal poetry, I’ve discovered that a given form is possessed of genius as much or more than the writer: the “extraordinary intellectual power” of a poem lies in the potential of its form. This power is especially obvious in a form like the sonnet that has been handed down through generations, gaining flexibility and expressiveness and offering many models of technique, tone, subject, and vision.

Formal Poetry in NVR

Since NVR is devoted to formal lyric and narrative poetry, I was not surprised to find many forms represented. For those interested in exploring these forms and learning their genius, a partial listing follows. I focus on meters, stanza forms, and occasionally theme.

Eight sonnets were featured in a recent email sampler from this issue: Katherine Gordon, "Aloe Vera" (Shakespearian); Ernest Hilbert, "Pitch Meeting for Dillinger Escape Plan Part Two" (see below); Amit Majmudar, "Look No Further" (a a b a c b c // e e f g g f); Lisa Barnett, "Kissing in Cars" (two seven-line stanzas, a b a c b b c // b d e d e g g); Claudia Gary, "Still Seventeen" (Shakespearian); Steven Searcy, "Too Easy to Remember" (a b b a c d d c e f g e g f); Zara Raab, "Washington, D.C., the National Archives" (a b a a b c a c // d e d e g g); Bethel McGrew, "Psalm of the Flood” (a b a b c d c d d e f e f g g).

In addition, I note "A Shimmer of Dust and Starlight” by Ned Balbo based on a probably apocryphal story about the cat that saved Henry Wyatt from starving to death in prison by bringing him pigeons. It is a love poem of a sort, with two turns and an unusual rhyme scheme (a b a b c c [c slant rhymes with b] // d d e // f g g f e).

To this list of sonnets I add, as sonnet-adjacent, the nonrhyming 14-line poem in blank verse by Debra Bruce, “You Are An Inspiration! (No, You!).” It ends with a stunning metaphor for an unwanted, unearned compliment: “a stranger's swimsuit behind on a hook / which might stay there all day—who wants to wear / what isn't hers?—so damp, so intimate.”

Ernest Hilbert’s sonnet, "Pitch Meeting for Dillinger Escape Plan Part Two," is about gangsters arrested after watching a movie where gangsters are watching a movie in which gangsters watch a movie, etc.—an exercise in virtual recursion reflected in the repeated end line rhymes-- about/about, these/these, too/too, forget it/get it.

Triolet--Robert W. Crawford, "On First Looking Into Hubble's Deep Field."  Triolets have eight lines; the first line is repeated twice, and the second line repeated once, accounting for five of the eight lines. The key task of the form is to make these repetitions work. Everything depends on the choice of the first two lines. Crawford’s triolet begins: "So much, so many multiples of many / That many has no meaning any more...."

I believe it’s accurate to say I began writing triolets in number after reading Amit Majmudar, What He Did in Solitary (Knopt), many sections of which begin with untitled triolets.

Rondeau--Jean L. Kreiling, “The Mail Carrier.”

In a recent “The Rusty Paperweight” (NVR’s monthly newsletter), Knepper indirectly encouraged the writing of rondeau in English by quoting a substack article by Victoria Moul: “The simpler, more everyday kinds of rondeau, however, ought not really to be much more challenging in English than a sonnet, a form which has of course been enthusiastically domesticated. The most common form of rondeau has three stanzas of five, four and six lines, with the first half of line one being repeated as an abbreviated half line at the end of the second and third stanzas.” But I would add that a rondeau’s fifteen lines have only two rhymes. If sonnets are difficult to write in English, as some reasonably claim, because of the paucity of rhymes, the rondeau is even more challenging—though perhaps not “much more” than a tight Petrarchan sonnet.

Kreiling makes effective use of her refrain, rather cryptic without the context—“she likes the nor.” She demonstrates it can be used in different syntactic structures, a useful lesson.

Two sestinas--Shome Dasgupta, “A Louisiana Sestina”; Thomas Allan Orr, “The Feast of St Thomas on the Winter Solstice.”

Terza rima--Barbara Lydecker Crane, “Reverberations.” A celebration of two migrants imprisoned (their Purgatorio) in Italy who make musical instruments—“viols, violins, and cellos”—from the cedar planks of “the bobbing boats” in which (their Inferno) they crossed the Mediterranean, instruments used in a performance of The Four Seasons (Paradiso).

Fourteeners--Sydney Lea, “Bloom.” To vary the hypnotic, mechanical effect that this meter is prone to, with a regular caesura after the fourth foot, the poet has arranged for the caesura often to fall after the third foot, once after the fifth foot, and once after both the second and fifth feet. Like the poem in dactyls and trochees discussed below, Lea’s poem demonstrates new possibilities for this meter.

Dramatic monologue—NVR contains at least two interesting dramatic monologues. Brian Brodeur, “Jones Very in the Parlor,” is in blank verse, while Kelly Scott Franklin, “The Ballad of Martha Hunt” is written without stanza breaks, in iambic pentameter, but like a ballad rhymes on every other line (a b c b).

Ekphrastic poems—Jianqing Zheng has two free verse poems on photos by Eudora Welty, “Hard Times (Cherita)” and “Waiting” (many lines here lean into iambic). Two poems on objects seem to me to be in the ekphrastic spirit: Fr. Ryan Sliwa, “The Nikon” (free verse) and Cameron Brooks, “Pickup Smells” (blank verse).

Shaped poem--Amit Majmudar, “To His Phone,” is a terrific shaped poem about the amputation of our experience of life by the “prosthetic fantasies” offered by our phones. The shape of the poem graphically demonstrates the conclusion: “The hand that holds you has me by the neck.”

“To His Phone” and Majmudar’s sonnet mentioned above, “Look No Further,” reflect the screen-based virtual reality we currently inhabit. I’ve already mentioned Hilbert’s sonnet featuring gangster films on our oldest screen, the movie screen. This issue of NVR has other poems working this vein. Alex Rettie, “That Seventies Poem,” a poem in rhyming five-line stanzas of trochaic tetrameters (a a b b c // c d d e e // f f g g h // h i i j j), is about watching hockey game on TV as a family. In Daniel Patrick Sheehan’s “The Particular Judgment,” the Book of Life is projected onto a screen: “In the screen of flames above the golden throne / I saw the drab unfolding of my life.” Sheehan’s poem is in quatrains of iambic pentameter lines rhyming a b b a.

"Stakes," by Alice Allen, is a narrative in blank verse set among "these Christians who were experts / on everything Joss Whedon used to do" and given to long, inconclusive theological disputes over "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel." Can poetry redeem us from our addiction to little screens?

Narratives in quatrains constitute an important form in this issue. Examples include, Clarence Caddell, “Family Reunion” (iambic pentameter quatrains, rhyming a b a b); Jane Blanchard, “Eventuality” (iambic tetrameter quatrains, generally rhyming a b c b) ; Felicity Teague, “Chess with Jimmy” (iambic pentameter quatrains, rhyming a b a b); and Seiji Hakui, “Dream of an Old Fox (Based on a Folk Tale)” (ballad stanza, iambic tetrameter lines alternating with trimeter, rhyming a b c b. Many lines begin with trochees).

More Extended Comments on Poems

Finally, I’d like to discuss some poems I particularly enjoyed. It’s a somewhat arbitrary list, since I could list many more here.

Steven Searcy, “The Working World.” The poem has two nine-lines stanzas that rhyme with each other; that is, the corresponding lines in each stanza rhyme:

     a b c d e f g h i
     a b c d e f g h i

The lines are basically iambic, but the number of feet vary per line; the lines in the second stanza tend to be longer than those in the first. More interesting to me are the numerous internal rhymes, the alliteration, and the tone. The first four lines of the second stanza are illustrative:

     The uncurled petals of noon will change,
     but not too soon—the sky seeps song, long logs
     are laid in shade, and every feather
     finds the slot where it ought to be.

It is an unusual and refreshing nature poem.

Alfred Nicol, “Wretched Rocco.” My favorite teacher in college, Arthur Henry King, once told a class that the predominant emotion he discerned in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar was the joy of the young poet—he was not yet 30—in his creativity and mastery. I don’t know Nicol’s emotions on writing this poem, but I do sense that kind of joy as I read it.

The poem strikes me as having been written in a defined form, but I confess to not being able to identify the form. It is highly repetitive, rhythmically driven, and just plain fun, like many of the poems of Clément Marot. Throughout the poem, the first, second, fifth, and eighth lines are in iambic pentameter and end in Rocco. In each stanza, those same lines are almost identical, but words can be switched out so long as the new word rhymes with the deleted word. The remaining lines are tetrameter; lines three and four rhyme, as do lines six and seven. Here’s the first stanza:

     There'll be no place for you, pesky Rocco.
     They'll lose all trace of you, nudgy Rocco.
     Too many angels on a pin--
     they won't be squeezing tomcats in.
     There'll be no place for you, nudgy Rocco.
     They'll want to fold their wings and rest;
     you're an unwelcome little pest.
     There'll be no place for you, nudgy Rocco.

Wherever he may be, Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry must be enjoying the poem, though the fate of Rocco and the poet are sobering: “We'll have to pay for our mistakes. / Let's see how long forever takes.”

Jared Carter, “Andromeda” and “Sickle.” Though I’ve never written a successful poem in the form of Carter’s two short poems, I’m particularly fond of it: quatrains with the first and third lines in iambic tetrameters, the second and fourth lines in iambic dimeter. “The Sickle” ends in an amazing simile; the poet’s father handled a sickle

     … like a man waving a snake
        at a meeting 
     In a tent, out in the canebrake,
        God entreating.

Christopher Childers, “O Holy Night,” written in five quatrains. The overriding meter is dactylic/trochaic. The 1st and 3rd lines of each stanza have six poetic feet (hexameter), the 2nd and 4th lines have four (tetrameters).

Here’s the second line of the poem--

     SCAT-tered on / PRES-by-/TER-i-an /BENCH-es.

The same meter, alternating dactyls and trochees, is used in Whitman’s famous line:

     OUT of the / CRA-dle / END-less-ly / ROCK-ing

Childers is the translator and editor of the recently published Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse (March 2024), a remarkable achievement.

Like many poems here, this one opens up for me the possibility of using a meter I’ve never tried.

Conclusion that Does Not Conclude

NVR is my favorite poetry journal at the moment; I highly recommend it both to readers and practicing poets.

In thinking about my own modest achievements in poetry, and how often the achieved work falls short of ambition, I recall a few lines from a French poem by Rilke, “The Fruit Carrier” (“La Porteuse de Fruits”) where the carrier addresses the fruit:

     the winters imagined you, calculated you,
     in the roots and under the bark of the trunks
     (by lamplight).
     But you are probably more beautiful
     than all those plans, o you, the beloved works.

The poets in NVR may not have achieved all they aimed for, but the ambition, the craft, and the quality are impressively high.

Questions? Corrections? Complaints? Send them to [email protected]

Posted 24 March 2025

​Katie Nordt LaRosa, 2014

Winter Beeches
When cold sun sifts down through the understory,
the beech leaves glow, like a brown-winged miller
that hovers round the street lamp and beats the powder
from its wings. This light is the modest glory
of our winter. On work days, when we speed
distracted here and there, we may not notice.
But walk near in the fog, half-past the solstice--
in February, when peepers start to breed:
the glow will draw us through the backlit haze
into an ashen spring. Now I think of this
half light in the August heat, as Joe-pye’s
pink clouds smolder in the ditch and days
are growing shorter; as the lake’s cool mist
clings to the pines and mutes the sun’s slow rise.
     --Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VII: North Carolina (Texas A&M Press, 2015); Mouth Work (St Andrews University Press, 2016)

Grass Cracks
​grass cracks
under my boots
tears blow into my eyes

the man
I might have been
dreaming about me--

a vast iron sky
a field of terse stubble
feeding one crow
     Mouth Work (St Andrews University Press, 2016)

​crow in the white oak
eyeing the empty field
as if he owned it
—Inspired by Issa


night rain
a crow caws
from far away


crow caws
shaking the tree
night rain falls again

Posted 2 Feb 2025. Send comments to [email protected]

vi

winter pond
low sun’s
ricochets of light


low sun
even the water
in the culvert glows


nothing is lost
sunlight of 1960
aflame on the hearth


Journal entry, 29 January 2010: “Duke Gardens: Winter jasmine is starting to bloom by the dry fish pond. Two quarreling geese abruptly make up at sunset & paddle together.”

The Sun of Austerlitz, 2 December 1895
“[Napoleon] looked now at the Pratzen Heights, now at the sun floating up out of the mist. When the sun had entirely emerged from the fog, and fields and mist were aglow with dazzling light—as if he had only awaited this to begin the action—he drew the glove from his shapely white hand, made a sign with it to the marshals, and ordered the action to begin. The marshals, accompanied by adjutants, galloped off in different directions, and a few minutes later the chief forces of the French army moved rapidly toward those Pratzen Heights which were being more and more denuded by Russian troops moving down the valley to their left.”--Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (p. 439), translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Global Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Callimachus, Epigram 34
When I heard, Heraclitus, you were dead,
I thought of all the suns we’d talked to bed
those nights, and the tears came. Dear guest, I know
that you were ashes long and long ago,
and yet your nightingales are singing still:
Death kills all things, but them he cannot kill.
 
Translated by Christopher Childers, The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse (p. 280). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Malachi 4:2
 
"But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall."


Posted 27 January 2025. Send comments to [email protected]

Carl Christian Constantin Hansen, Girl with Fruit in a Basket (The painting is found in many places on the web.)

The second poem in Rilke’s sequence “Trois Porteuses” is a bit of puzzle. Here I will be working out an understanding of the poem.

La Porteuse de Fruits
Voici ce que c’est que l’année.
Si ronds que vous soyez, vous n’êtes pas les têtes:
on vous a pensés là-bas, o fruits achevés,
les hivers ont imaginés, calculés,
dans les racines et sous l’écorce des troncs
(à la lampe).
Mais sans doute êtes-vous plus beaux
que tous ces projets, o vous, les œuvres aimées.
Et moi, je vous porte. Votre poids
me rend plus sérieuses que je ne suis.
J’exprime malgré moi je ne sais quel regret
semblable à celui de la fiancée étonnée
lorsqu’elle s’en va embrasser,
une à une, ses pales amies d’enfance.
  
The Fruit Carrier
This is what the year is all about.
Though round you may be, you are not heads:
we thought of you there, o ripe fruits,
the winters imagined you, calculated you,
in the roots and under the bark of the trunks
(by lamplight).
But you are probably more beautiful
than all those plans, o you, the beloved works.
And it’s I who carries you. Your weight
makes me more serious than I am.
Despite myself, I express some regret
like that of the astonished fiancée
when she goes to kiss,
one by one, her pale childhood friends. 

Like “The Flower Carrier,” this poem is a dramatic monologue. The speaker’s first, challenging line—“This is what the year is all about”—is key to understanding all that follows, including the next, puzzling line: “Though round you may be, you are not heads,” a line we come to understand as addressing the fruit she’s carrying. Here my knowledge of idiomatic French may fail me; as in English, lettuce is described as a head (tête de laitue), but fruit isn’t, so far as I know. But whatever wordplay Rilke may be using here, the point becomes clear in the next four lines: in the winter, we used our heads—“we thought of you,” “the winters imagined you, calculated you” by lamplight—to make plans (projets) for the coming harvest. The passage from winter to summer, from hope to reality, is the year.

The plans of winter are “probably” (sans doute) less beautiful than the picked fruit in the carrier's basket. The works of summer--les œuvres aimées—are beloved in a way mere plans and projects, the immediate results of thinking and calculation, cannot be.

“The Flower Carrier” ends with the speaker imagining that her beloved calls her light (Légère). In “The Fruit Carrier,” the weight of the fruit she carries makes the speaker both heavy and serious, in both English and French the opposite of light / légère: Votre poids / me rend plus sérieuses que je ne suis (Your weight / makes me more serious than I am).

The surprising simile at the end of the poem reminds us of “The Flower Carrier” who sits obediently beside the man to whom she’s given her hands. Bearing the weight of the fruit gives the fruit carrier a sense of regret, like that of a fiancée bidding farewell to her childhood as she kisses her childhood friends.  

Fruit is considered a human endeavor—the object of plans and calculations, realized in works (œuvres) that induce emotions resembling those accompanying a change in social status, from unmarried to married. What remains of nature is perhaps the vague regret felt by the speaker. But nature is contained within human categories and concerns. I am reminded of those formal Renaissance gardens, where well-pruned orange trees grew in round pots held by horizontal balustrades in a walled garden that served as another room in the house. (I’m paraphrasing Ruth Wedgewood Kennedy, The Renaissance Painter’s Garden (Oxford, 1948), 4.)

Posted 23 January 2025 in Nashville, TN. Send comments to [email protected]

​Katie Nordt LaRosa, 2014

v.
frigid tomorrow
upright pine
bristles with light

The Perils and Pleasures of Prediction
 
"[T]he inability of predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history (xxiv)….What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it….
     Black Swans being unpredictable, we need to adjust to their existence (rather than naively try to predict them). There are many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know. Among many other benefits, you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans (of the positive kind) by maximizing your exposure to them. .... [A]lmost no discovery, no technologies of note, came from design and planning--they were just Black Swans."--Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: Second Edition, xxv

“When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice—it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos. The subjective meaning that we encounter there is the reaction of our deepest being, our neurologically and evolutionarily grounded instinctive self, indicating that we are ensuring the stability but also the expansion of habitable, productive territory, of space that is personal, social and natural. It’s the right place to be, in every sense. You are there when—and where—it matters. That’s what music is telling you, too, when you’re listening—even more, perhaps, when you’re dancing—when its harmonious layered patterns of predictability and unpredictability make meaning itself well up from the most profound depths of your Being.” Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (pp. 42-43). Random House of Canada. Kindle Edition.

“Clarity and concision hamper the storyteller, for he makes his living from unpredictable leaps of transformation and an inexhaustible supply of breath.”—Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies, 1992, 63.

Our Own Unpredictable Song
 
“In a powerful meditation, the nineteenth-century Hasidic commentary Shem Mi-Shmuel asks how Moses and the Israelites managed spontaneously and simultaneously to sing the same words and melody. All sing Zeh Keli—'This is my God’—though the words are, in a sense, Moses’ singular idiom. In general, zeh—this—is considered his personal idiom, expressing the clarity of vision that characterizes him: ‘God’s presence speaks from out of his [Moses’] throat.’ But at this moment, all Israel shared his immediacy of vision—God within their vocal chords; even embryos in their mothers’ womb, says the Talmud, sing in the Sea—although, Shem Mi-Shmuel notes, their vocal chords were not yet developed! That is, the experience was of the song arising from deep within them, from some internal otherness. Essentially, it is the Shechinah—God’s presence—that sings. The song is theirs only in the sense that they intend, like Moses, to sing. But their song is not theirs, in the sense that some voice beyond the personal sings through them: It sings.
     This Hasidic teaching conveys a sense of the personal-impersonal sources of song. Unconscious desires and fears vibrate within the singing voice. A whole people here open themselves to the deep experience of an elsewhere. In a sense, they are not responsible for their own song. In that sense, it sings.” [emphases added]
     The psychoanalyst Donnel B. Stern writes: ‘The more fully an experience is our own—the more it comes from what we like to call “deep down within us”—the more it usually feels, oddly enough, as if it comes from elsewhere.’ Many poets and composers have described the experience of inspiration in similar terms: Coleridge, Blake, Mozart (‘Where and how they come I know not’), Keats (‘The poet does not know what he has to say till he has said it’), Rilke (‘Let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion quite in itself … beyond reach of one’s own understanding’), Valéry (‘A poem is a discourse that requires and sustains continuous connection between the voice that is and the voice that is coming and must come’), Tsvetaeva (‘The poet’s hand does not belong to her but to that which waits to exist through her’).
     ‘And He placed in my mouth a new song,’ the Psalmist writes (Ps. 40:4); and the midrash adds, ‘This refers to the Song of the Sea.’ Between the miry clay of Egypt and the firm foothold in the midst of the Sea, a new song is formed. Something unpredictable sings from Moses’ throat. What then can we say about Miriam’s song?”— Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Bewilderments (p. 101-103). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

​Charles Dana Gibson, “A Love Long,” Sketches and Cartoons (1900). Public domain.

​Three Hands, Vincent van Gogh, c.1884; Nunen / Nuenen, Netherlands. Public domain

The Flower Carrier
They no longer belong to me, my hands,
they belong to the flowers I’ve just gathered;
may these flowers, with an imagination so pure,
invent another being for these hands
that are no longer mine. Then,
obedient, I will set myself beside him,
beside that being. Curious about my old hands,
I will leave him no more, listening to him
with all my heart, before he says to me:
O Light One.
  
La Porteuse de Fleurs
Elles ne sont plus à moi, mes mains,
elles sont à ces fleurs que je viens de cueillir ;
puissent-elles, ces fleurs à l'imagination si pure,
inventer un autre être à ces mains
qui ne sont plus miennes. Alors,
obéissante, je me mettrai à côté de lui,
à côté de cet être, curieuse de mes mains anciennes
et je ne le quitterai plus l'écoutant
de tout mon cœur, avant qu'il ne me dise :
ô Légère.
 
I’ve been thinking about a trio of Rilke’s French poems for awhile—« La Porteuse de Fleurs » (the flower carrier), « La Porteuse de Fruits » (the fruit carrier), and « La Porteuse de L’Eau » (the water carrier). Each represents an interesting point of view based on imaginative mental and emotional experiences.

« La Porteuse de Fleurs » attracted my interest because of the odd conceit it’s built around, the flower carrier’s fantasy that her hands can be reimagined by the flowers they carry as belonging to a being the flowers invent. She will place herself by his side, obey him, stick with him, all because her old hands on his arms attract her curiosity. And she will listen to him (silently, I imagine) until he says, “O Light One.” What he means by that, whether it is the consummation of their relationship or its breaking point, I do not know. Perhaps Rilke is playing with the expression, found in English and French, “to give one’s hand in marriage.”

As I read poems, I often ponder the experiences that give rise to them. Imagining someone else in possession of your hands—is that a whimsical flight or verbal wit (literalizing the giving of hands in marriage) or is it based on some experience or perception?

​On several occasions a year or so ago, as I was falling asleep, I experienced the sensation of losing connection with my hands: they drifted away from my wrists and floated in the air an inch or two away.

The Separate Life of Hands
 Sometimes the hands
detaching from my wrists
float free as I am falling
asleep--
           Thumbs relaxed
unopposing
fingers half curled

drift out of the world
empty of desire
                       ungrasping
pencil or key
                       untasked
hovering in place, aimless
thick-veined idling hands
taking their rest

weightless in the air
unfolding in prayer
 
 
The poem's title is from Hermann Broch, Death of Virgil.


Posted 15 Jan 2025. Please send comments to [email protected].

​Cynthia Reeves, “Untitled,” 1970s

iv
record lows
earth fills its pockets
with frozen pebbles

cold days, colder nights
who can explain
suffering to a stone?

How simply the feelings flow this afternoon
Over the simplest words:
It is too cold for work, now, in the fields.
—Wallace Stevens

​Casting the First Stone

“In a fascinating interview with Michel Treguer …, [René] Girard elucidates how Jesus deals with the murderous mob, as related in the Gospel of John, that wishes to stone the adulterous woman. Jesus, he suggests, bends down and writes in the dirt to avoid setting off the angry crowd by looking directly in their eyes and thus provoking them. Then, by asking who will throw the first stone, he makes clear how different it is to initiate a violent act than to imitate it. He is challenging the individuals in the mob to self-examination. Christianity, Girard argues, defends victims by taking aim at the ‘automatism’ of violent mimetic desire and contagion. It proclaims truth amid a plethora of lies.”—Daniel J. Mahoney, “Mimetic Musings,” review of René Girard, All Desire Is a Desire for Being,” New Criterion, Sept 2024, 61

Winter of 1915-1916 in Vienna
 
“In the winter of 1915-16, the effects of the war could be felt in everyday life. The time of the enthusiastically singing recruits in Prinzenallee was gone. When small groups of them now trudged past us on our way home from school, they didn’t look at us as cheerful as before. They still sang ‘In the homeland, in the homeland we’ll meet again!’, but home didn’t seem so close to them. They were no longer so certain that they’d be coming back. They sang ‘I had a comrade,’ but as though they themselves were the fallen comrade they sang about.…
     Once, walking along the Schüttel, we came near the railroad bridge that spanned the Danube Canal. A train was standing there, it was stuffed with people. Freight cars were joined to passenger cars; they were all jammed with people staring down at us, mutely, but questioningly. ‘Those are Galician – ‘ Schiebl [his friend] said, holding back the word ‘Jews’ and replacing it with ‘refugees.’ Leopoldstadt was full of Galician Jews who had fled from the Russians. Their black kaftans, their earlocks, and their special hats made them stand out conspicuously. Now they were in Vienna, where could they go? They had to eat too, and things didn’t look so good for food in Vienna.
     I had never seen so many of them penned together in railroad cars. It was a dreadful sight because the train was standing. All the time we kept staring, it never moved from the spot. ‘Like cattle,’ I said, ‘that’s how they’re squeezed together, and there are also cattle cars.’
     ‘Well, there are so many of them,’ said Schiebl, tempering his disgust at them for my sake; he would never have uttered anything that could offend me. But I stood transfixed, and he, standing with me, felt my horror. No one waved at us, no one called, they knew how unwelcome they were and they expected no word of welcome. They were all men and a lot were old and bearded. ‘You know,’ said Schiebl, ‘our soldiers are sent to the war in such freight cars. War is war, my father says.’ Those were the only words of his father’s that he ever quoted to me, and I realized he was doing it to wrench me out of my terror. But it didn’t help, I stared and stared, and nothing happened. I wanted the train to start moving, the most horrible thing of all was that the train still stood on the bridge.”—Elias Canetti, The Tongue Set Free (FSG, 1979), 109-111

“       … the tea steam hangs
Phantom chrysanthemums on long, evaporating stems
In the air of the winter apartment.”
—Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “Kremlin of Smoke, I. The Salon,” in The Lamplit Answer (FSG, 1985), 3

Posted 12 January 2025. Send comments to [email protected]

​Cynthia Reeves, “Floating Form,” 1978. Like the dreams of a baby in the womb.

iii

rain now, snow later
the house curls around itself
dreaming of fire

If there were dreams to sell
What would you buy?
—Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Here we are all, by day; by night we are hurled
By dreames, each one, into a sev'rall world.
—Robert Herrick

serenity
the shadow in the light
like blue smoke
—Philippe Jaccottet

winter dawn
the cold car
idles in its smoke

winter morning
by the road
the dead possum smokes

Stand in the fire of the present moment, just as you are, receiving it just as it is, as whatever kind of grace it may...be.—Adam S. Miller

Fire ... links the small to the great, the hearth to the volcano, the life of a log to the life of a world.—Gaston Bachelard

in love at last
she throws a pine knot
into the fire

Winter is a simplifier.
Cold and dark
do the work of fire.

 
Tell Me Where All Past Years Are
 
She had a broad lap, a feed sack apron.
We sat warming on the stoop,
and everything around falling
fell onto her sack, golden
catkins, chinquapin burs, pods
of locust sticky with their honey,
dust of stars, the dust of furrows.
She hummed; I translate:

When will the time come back to me
when hours were in my pocket
as many and heavy as loose pennies, 
when days oozed slow and thick
as end-of-summer honey, when happiness
formed in my hands like butter from the churn
to squeeze and pat into a cake
and print with a petal crown of daisies?

Now we both are humming, sixty or more
years between renditions, and while
we sing the sun clocks out and the moon
on the ridgetop stands and shakes out its lap,
a glowing radium dial.
     Visions International, 2022


The Day

The little room’s only window looked out
towards the ridgetop, the Dunkard church in the curve
of the two-lane, and, just beyond, the graveyard.

The morning sun sidled in past the half-closed
slats and resolved into rays and flecks
burning in the light—dust motes, I know,

and likely knew then, too, but still entranced
I watched one morning after our breakfast.
On this day I’d have otherwise forgotten,

probably my grannies were in the kitchen--
Emma with arms stretched out to read who’d died
(she’d be in the Dunkard cemetery soon),

half-crippled Sallie stringing the green beans
(years of suffering and strokes lay just ahead)--
while I stood quietly in the little room to see

random sparks caught in the sunbeam’s glow,
worlds I could move with a single breath
of poem or prayer, but could not control.
      Skating Rough Ground, 2022

Out of Selection Come Painful Cattle

The present is a cow grazing
the meadow—a fawn-colored Jersey,
from muzzle to switch absorbed
in filling her rumen. Many cattle,
many presents, moving together
across the meadow, up
the hill into a stand of locusts.
They graze and chew, passing
the world through four stomachs
beautifully named—omasum
that some call manyplies,
abomasum, the honey-combed
reticulum, the paunch. 
The cattle leave their pasts
behind, in dark green puddles. 

Let the future come to you. 
It will swell like a freshening udder,
it will break into dark bloom
like the flower of afterbirth,
it will be rough tongues licking
breath into your lungs, throatfuls
of milk sucked greedily
from the teat, a season of frolic,
a day of weaning and bawling,
the moment when ownership
cuts into your ear, the months’ long
dark of mire and muck
when the dog-foot and clover hay
bursts with summer’s fragrance. 
It will be the cold shock
of the salt-block on your tongue,
the heat of the chemical dehorning,
the days fattening in the feedlot,
the rebirth in the chute, the ride,
the unnamed place you go to.

To lard its secret flesh
with purpose, the future will feast
on lespedeza and wind-punched
apples, on corn shocks and silage
sweet with that year’s molasses. 
Let it go slow, placing its feet only
where you have stepped, seeing
only what you have seen, trees
herded into evening shade. 
May it come up behind you
like a man with a halter
to lead you back to the barn. 
     A different, later version appeared in Skating Rough Ground (Kelsay Press, 2022)

NOTE: The title is from Gertrude Stein, “A Box,” in Tender Buttons, 1912

 
The Presentness of the Past and Future
 “For Augustine, the past and the future are present to the reflecting mind in the present, and that mutual co-presence is exemplified in the ontological involvements of actions and their larger temporal contexts. The past and the future are ontologically present in the present, not just objects of thought for the mind. Things in the present are related to their being to the past and the future. In his way, Augustine belabored these puzzles, and those who have followed him (notably Heidegger) are indebted to the breakthrough that he opened up.... Augustine certainly sees the past no longer existent and the future not yet existent, but he also sees them as simultaneously existent and present in the present to the relating and involved soul or mind. In his language, the soul is 'distended'; he speaks of a 'distentio animi,' some of those meaning is present already in ‘intentio.’ The word intentio in Latin has meanings a lot broader than its English cognate (‘to put in tension’ is only one, and distento in some ways merely selects and emphasizes the meanings that English has lost."—Andrew P Porter, Living in Spin: Narrative as a Distributed Ontology of Human Action (AuthorHouse, 2011), 117-8.
 
*****
 
“The first [the naturalistic] concept of time cuts up time into accurately limited single sections and into single facts standing in those sections, which is finally possible only by reducing time to spatial happenings. Historical time, on the other hand, means a stream in which nothing is limited and isolated, but where all things flow into each other, where past and future are put into each other, where each present time carries, in a productive manner, at once past and future, where a measuring is not possible but only caesuras, which are more or less arbitrarily put in according to connections of meaning and great changes of meaning. The chronological reduction of those proceedings to spatial solar time is only a very crude and superficial means of orientation, which has nothing to do with the inner division, with the inner slowness or rapidity.”—Andrew P Porter, Living in Spin, 92-3, summarizing Ernst Troeltsch's formal logic of history in Der Historismus und seine Probleme.
 
 
Memory and History
 “[W]hat happens is inseparable from what people think happens. Inseparable; but not identical, and not enduring.... when it comes to a human event, a later realization that what happened was not what we/thought happened usually involves an increase in the quality of our knowledge, together with a decrease in the quantity in our memory.—John Lukacs, “The Presence of Historical Thinking,” in Remembered Past, 6-7.