The Making of “The Second Coming”

1.M:  If only you would stop lying!W (gesture of arms):  I have never lied, my father never told a lie, my grandfather never told a lie.  M:  You are lying now.   So Yeats (“W”), and Maud Gonne (“M”), in a December 8, 1918 public confrontation, at Stephen’s Green “among the nurses and perambulators,” both, …

Some Thoughts on Punctuation

1.One day in class at Iowa, Donald Justice brought in a poem by a poet he named only as “Anonymous” and asked what we thought of it and whether we could identify the author.  The poem had standard punctuation and line breaks and regular stanzas.  We thought — I thought — that standard punctuation was …

Notes on The Angel of History

1./Intro It is exciting to be in the presence as true voice discovers itself.  That was my experience rereading Carolyn Forché’s stunning The Angel of History, now, a quarter-century after its original appearance.  That sense of originality and authenticity duplicated my original experience, but with this difference:  Now that familiarity has dimmed the sheen of …

Some poems of Rene Char

About Rene Char  During his lifetime René Char (1907–1988) was regarded by critics and public as France's greatest living poet. Like so many of his colleagues, he was also a warrior in World war II, serving as a member of the French Resistance under the name of Captain Alexandre. He was in charge of seven departements …

Reality Intrudes: A Moment In The Cantos That Changes Everything

1. Reality intrudes at the start of “Canto III” of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, creating the pivot on which the poem rises from the land of the dead described in the first two Cantos to announce itself as an epic, with the poet as its hero.  This moment of reality comprises just six lines describing …

A Translation of Apollinaire’s “Zone”

I love this poem, “Zone.”  It opens Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1913 book Alcools. It was the last poem he wrote for that book, and in some ways it inaugurated the modern era of poetry, with its use of dislocations, collage, lack of punctuation, and fluid identity.  It is a poem of huge gaiety and vitality, and …

A Translation & Notes on Pervigilium Veneris

Pervigilium Veneris 1.  These two wonderful lines in an 85-line odd poem of unknown authorship written between the 1st and 4th centuries have drawn translators from Thomas Parnell to Ezra Pound to Allen Tate to any number of university professors: Cras amet qui nunquam amati Quique amavit tras ame.   They seemed plain enough when …

On Andre Breton’s “Free Union”

Free Union (Andre Breton) My wife with the wood-burning hair Whose thoughts are summer lightning Whose waist is the size of an hourglass Like an otter in the teeth of a tiger My wife with a mouth of cockade-ribbons And a bouquet of brightest stars Whose teeth are the footprints of a white mouse on …

On Editing: A Modest Proposal for Poetry Magazines

Here's something I don't believe:  That the real purpose of editorial committees is to bring fairness to the process.  I think the real purpose of editorial committees is to spread the blame for failure so that no one has to take responsibility. Any editor knows that every issue of every magazine is a testament to …

Notes on the One-Line Poem

1. Why not a one-line poem? Think about it:  The greatness of poetry as a medium is that it can take in anything, and anything it takes in can become good or even great poetry:  Think of the worlds of things taken in by Whitman and Dickinson, Ginsberg and Hecht and Ammons, Black Mountain, Deep …