When I told my eleven-year-old daughter that I was starting a poetry journal, she said that I should call it “The Rusty Paperweight.” That’s pretty good, I thought. I decided that any missives from the New Verse Review editorial desk would go under that name. (You can check out another one of her concept sketches above.) This is the first of those editorial missives, a link round-up. Stay tuned for a review of J.C. Scharl’s collection Ponds next week.
Remember, NVR opens for submissions to its inaugural issue on July 1, 2024.
Thanks for reading New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Prufrock
The best literary link round-up in Substack Land is undoubtedly Prufrock, edited by Micah Mattix, who is also the poetry editor at First Things. Prufrock features plenty of poetry news as well as Mattix’s reflections, including these recent remarks on Ezra Pound’s essays “A Retrospect” and “How to Read.” Well worth the ticket price!
Poems Ancient and Modern
And if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign up for the great substack Poems Ancient and Modern, edited by Sally Thomas and Joseph Bottum. Each daily post features a poem—sometimes a recognized classic, sometimes a neglected gem—with a brief introductory essay. For a sample, see Thomas on Willa Cather’s “Fides, Spes” or Bottum on Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib.” If you are a teacher or professor, consider sharing the site with students interested in learning more about poetry. Poems Ancient and Modern offers regular readers a fine poetic education.
Let Go The Goat
Over the past few months, Mike Rippy has released a series of interviews with form-minded poets under the great title Let Go The Goat. Every conversation is worth a listen. Recent episodes feature Jesse Keith Butler, G.E. Schwartz, and Katie Hartsock.
Faith and Imagination Podcast
Also be sure to check out the Faith and Imagination podcast, sponsored by BYU’s Humanities Center and often hosted by the wonderful Matthew Wickman. Recent poetry guests include Benjamin P. Myers, the aforementioned Sally Thomas, Darlene Young, Mischa Willett, and Diane Glancy.
Poetry World
Benjamin Myers, “The Mystery of Father-Son Relationships”
Speaking of Benjamin Myers, he has a review in Plough Quarterly of B.H. Fairchild’s recent collection An Ordinary Life. This is the case of one excellent poet of the Great Plains reviewing another:
Fairchild has been a prominent name in American poetry since the nineties. The Art of the Lathe, Fairchild’s third book, is to my generation of poets what Radiohead’s OK Computer is to my generation of indie musicians. The Art of the Lathe helped establish a central place in American poetry for a certain kind of narrative and anecdotal poem that is touched by confessionalism without the psychological sensationalism one might associate with the confessional poets.
If you are interested in reading more about Fairchild, I reviewed An Ordinary Life for Commonweal back in the fall.
Boris Dralyuk Reading
In February, Boris Dralyuk read from his excellent collection My Hollywood and Other Poems at UCLA. The video recording is available here.
Maryann Corbett, “Capital Improvements: The Initial-Caps Wars”
My favorite poetry essay of recent months was Maryann Corbett’s well-researched and absorbing (trust me!) piece in Literary Matters on “the initial-caps war”:
Among the Modernists, though, there are also plenty of capitalizers. Some poets made their moves haltingly, settling eventually on lowercase. In H. D.’s poems we can find a mix of approaches, and Marianne Moore started with caps and underwent a conversion. But many others stuck with line capitals. Pick up T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, 1909–1962, flip its pages, and you won’t find a single line that begins with a lowercase letter. Skim through the Poetry Foundation’s offerings of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein: yet more capitals.
In the interest of peacemaking, New Verse Review welcomes the work of those on both sides of the “initial-caps” divide.
Setting Poetry to Music
Here is a link to the proceedings of a seminar on “Setting Poetry to Music” at the 2022 Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW) Conference. Check out Claudia Gary’s intriguing essay (also available at Expansive Poetry Online):
To me, setting a poem to music is a multi-level conversation: first between the composer and the poem, then between vocal and instrumental lines, and finally between performers and audience. I strive for a strong melody, and I want the music to enhance the words, just as a poem’s form can enhance its own content. This conversational aspect has led me to enjoy setting poems by others more than setting my own poems to music.
There are links to Gary’s own chamber music settings of poems at the end of the essay.
Amit Majmudar, “Impulse and Repetition: On Two Poems By Robert Frost”
Amit Majmudar has an essay at the Slant Books “Close Reading” blog on two lesser known Robert Frost poems: “The Impulse” and “Devotion.” Frost is a poet of “contraries,” and this essay brings that out by contrasting a poem of sudden dissolution with one of continual renewal. Also, note this insightful passage on the power of narrative poetry:
Just as Frost does not tell us why she is tossing those wood chips, he does not give us any description of the interior mental state of either husband or wife. Nor does he tell us where she went, or even if she is still alive, nor what the husband does after he is abandoned. These elisions, these suppressions of information, give the poem a power that a novel many thousands of times its word count would squander in detailed internal monologues and back stories. We know just enough to share the husband’s surprise and bafflement and slow, retrospective realization. This is an instance where poetry outdoes conventional prose fiction as a storytelling medium. The story could have been boring or commonplace. The telling rescues it and makes it immediate.
Phil Klay on Ishion Hutchinson
I haven’t had a chance to read Ishion Hutchinson’s School of Instructions, a long poem of WWI and historical memory with a David Jones-inspired cover, but it is on my summer list. (His earlier collection House of Lords and Commons was one of my favorite reads this past year.) Phil Klay has a review in Commonweal:
School of Instructions emerged when the Imperial War Museum in London commissioned Hutchinson to do research in 2016 on West Indian participation in the First World War. Perhaps they thought they’d get a poet “recovering forgotten histories” by making stuff up. But Hutchinson is a reader not only of Jones but also of the great English poet Geoffrey Hill. He is acutely conscious of how we project ourselves into the past, but also of how the past blends continually, and complexly, into the present, inaccessible and yet constitutive of our very being. Instead of an imagined infantryman fighting in the Middle Eastern campaign—the only campaign in which West Indian troops saw combat—Hutchinson centers his poem on Godspeed, a boy attending a strict school in rural Jamaica in the 1990s, reading his Britannia and communing with the past. The narrative of the soldiers is told at a cool distance, often as if scanning archival reports of troop movements, while the Godspeed sections this narrative bleeds into allow for the history to become tactile…
A.E. Stallings, “The Bat Poet: Poetry as Echolocation”
If you missed A.E. Stallings’s inaugural Oxford Professor of Poetry lecture “The Bat Poet,” be sure to give it a listen. She moves from Jarrell to the philosopher Thomas Nagel on through Dickinson, Wilbur, Roethke, and Hayden to Jarrell again. Stay to the end and you get a surprising but entirely plausible reading of Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.”
“Nearing the Origin: A Conversation with John Talbot”
Wayfare recently posted A.M. Juster’s interview with the poet and classicist John Talbot. It begins with some questions about Talbot’s time at Boston University when the faculty included Derek Walcott, Christopher Ricks, and Geoffrey Hill, among others. (There’s a great anecdote about Hill.
The interview moves on to questions about some of Talbot’s poems (with generously quoted passages) and about his general approach to poetry. In response to a question about aging, he reflects:
Age interests me more than youth—it always has. I’ve always felt a strong inclination to look backwards for the truth. In my naïve worldview, old people, old books, old languages are closer to the origin of things, where the truth of things, including love, is most likely to be encountered.
“Through the Rent, Eternity Enters: A Conversation with Marilyn Nelson and Christian Wiman”
The Hedgehog Review has published the transcript of a conversation between Abram Van Engen, Marilyn Nelson, and Christian Wiman. Here’s Nelson:
I wanted to write a saint’s life as an answer to this—as a way of finding my own center again and also as a way of exploring the question of whether there is a limit to our potential for good. Clearly, there seems no limit to our potential for evil: Is there a limit to our goodness? So, I wound up writing about George Washington Carver.
The resultant collection was Nelson’s Carver: A Life in Poems.
(Note the road trip theme of the first three)
Sarah Spivey’s “Dispossession” won the 2024 Frost Farm Prize. Here is an excerpt:
There is a world, perhaps, past fog and road,a world where time and busyness corrodeall mysteries into a tarnished science,where you are spelled for corporate compliance.But that world is not here, and if you resta moment, you may find you are dispossessedof all except the worm, the flowers, the tree,and take a bite of past eternity.
Mary Grace Mangano’s “Skylines and Horizons” in Amethyst Review
Rachel Hadas’s “Fast Ride” in The New Criterion
James Matthew Wilson’s “Tucson hospital, waiting room” in The New Criterion
David W. Landrum’s “Wooden Bridge in Ada, Michigan” in Autumn Sky Poetry
A.M. Juster’s “Approaching Zero” in The Hudson Review
Marly Youmans’s “The Third, the Youngest Son in Fairy Tales” in The North American Anglican
OthukeUmukoro’s “Understory” in The Hudson Review
Kelly Scott Franklin’s “Acquired Taste” in Able Muse
A.E. Stallings’s “Saronic” in the London Review of Books
JD Clapp’s “Bait Barge” in Wasteland Review
James Feichthaler’s “The Grim Reaper takes five” via E-Verse Radio
Stephen Binns’s “Evening, Washington Metro” in First Things
A Contemporary Classic
B.H. Fairchild’s “Beauty”—here is an excerpt:
what are you thinking?she asks again, and so I begin
to tell her about a strange afternoon in Kansas,
about something I have never spoken of, and we walk
to a window where the shifting light spreads a sheen
along the casem*nt, and looking out, we see the city
blazing like miles of uncut wheat, the farthest buildings
taken in their turn, and the great dome, the way
the metal roof of the machine shop, I tell her,
would break into flame late on an autumn day, with such beauty.
Thanks for reading New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
