  Currier and Ives: A Taste for the Fine Arts, 1868–1878 Near the end of each December I leaf through the poems we published in the Review since January—an annual audit. With surprising consistency over the years readers have told me, sounding almost confounded, that we seem to have no program when it comes to the poems in our pages: we are not formalist or otherwise, we don’t stick to any one school of enjambment or tone or tempo, we try to publish as much translated work as we can get our hands on. The only real requirement (I don’t usually offer in reply, because I don’t want to start an argument) is that the poems vibrate with some extra charge, the words in their given order gain a valence they don’t or even shouldn’t normally possess—a sort of electrical phenomenon that can be generated in any number of ways and can reach a variety of intensities, some very high, some subtle, some audible only at length, some achieved in tremendous brevity. I don’t mean this to sound like an airy, ahistorical quality, because the vibration depends in part on how the poem’s language relates to the world and political reality and what we call “real life.” One of the shortest poems in our pages this year was Jane Hirshfield’s “Cows Lying Down,” from the October 9 issue. It’s no disparagement to call it one of the simplest, too. The poem describes a cow (or cows) in the titular position, and then standing up. Yet there is such sly attention paid to their performance of this basic act that by the end—the eighth line—we are made to feel the full weight of meaning inherent in anyone’s becoming “unsupine.” It is, of course, a political poem because it thinks about power—a creature seems (forgive me) utterly not to have it, and then quite naturally yet miraculously exercises it. What might cows know that we don’t? Ben Lerner’s much longer poem “National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program,” from the May 15 issue, announces its timeliness, its embeddedness in the year’s dismal headlines. Yet as its six stanzas (each of them a considerable nine lines long) flow on, the music of the language and the effect of its collaged phrases melting into each other suggest things altogether deeper than a commentary on RFK Jr.’s latest anti-public-health ukase. Reading this fragmented hymn, with its fleeting punchlines and rain of bitter ironies, becomes its own experience, making you feel anew the experience of everyday life this year, this week:
The Palestinian poet Khaled Juma’s “Just a Loaf” (deftly translated from the Arabic by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor), from our September 25 issue, uses the most ordinary, conversational language—nothing heightened here except maybe the faint outline of the poem’s form, a sonnet balanced on its head—to communicate an experience of famine that most of our readers will never be unlucky enough to know. The speaker has been looking for a loaf of bread “for ten or so days.” That predicament is noted in the opening six lines, and in the second stanza, the sonnet’s octet, a searing corollary unfolds: we hear the speaker’s children interpret their parent’s inability to feed them. They can’t believe it’s not an intentional punishment, and the helpless parent must feel responsible for that inner injury as well. Poetry that appears in a magazine of prose is always a little subversive. It brings a different quality of time into our pages, brings different orders of time into contact. Each poem slows the flow of reading and demands a deeper attention. Simultaneously, if all goes well, the poem runs away with you; it ought to be language grabbing you by the lapel, in some sense estranging you from the more transactional language in the prose columns next door. Estranging you and returning you to the page with antennas resensitized, brain more supple. Perish the thought that poetry is “useful,” or that (to borrow Auden) it makes anything happen. Yet a poem might hit you as any real experience does—as a novelty, a bit of a shock, a long denial vaporized. Can novelty be useful? A question with which to greet the New Year. —Jana Prikryl A Selection of This Year’s Poetry  You are receiving this message because you signed up Update your address or preferencesView this newsletter onlineThe New York Review of Books |
sábado, 27 de diciembre de 2025
Becoming Unsupine
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