New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry—An Appreciation

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