#Knopfpoetry

[aaknopf]

Leila Mottley was regularly writing and performing poetry even before she published her novel Nightcrawling at only nineteen, in 2022; today we get an advance peek into her forthcoming first collection, woke up no light. Divided into hoods—sections on Girlhood, Neighborhood, Falsehood, and Womanhood—the poems instruct us, as here, in the art of noticing, speaking boldly, and feeling deeply.

what to do when you see a Black woman cry 

stop. hum a little / just for some sound / just for a way to fill us up it is streetlamp time / all moon-cheeked black girls are mourning / a wailing kind of undoing don’t mistake this as a tragedy / it is sacred don’t mistake this as a glorious pain / we hurt.

don’t tell me it will be alright. make me a gourmet meal and don’t expect me to do the dishes after don’t try to hug me without asking first if i slept last night / if i need some jasmine tea / and a bath in a tub deep enough to fit my grief

and if i say i want a hug don’t touch my hair while you do it / don’t twist my braids around your fingers or tell me my fro is matted in the back from banging my head on the wall of so many askings

you think we are sobbing for the men, but we are praying for the men / their favorite sweat-soaked t-shirts we are screeching for our thighs for our throats / and our teeth-chipping / for the terror and the ceremony / and the unending always of this sky

so if i let you see a tear drip / if i let you see my teeth chatter know you are witnessing a miracle know you are not entitled to my face crack / head shake / sob but i do not cry in front of just anyone so stop. hum a little / just for some sound / just to fill me up

More on this book and author: 

Learn more about woke up no light by Leila Mottley.

Browse other books by Leila Mottley and follow her on Instagram @leilamottley.

Click here to read Leila Mottley's curated list of recommended books about the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Leila Mottley will be in Brooklyn for a Poetry Night reading and conversation with Tatiana Johnson-Boria at Books Are Magic (Montague Street location) on April 24, 2024 at 7:00 PM. The event will also be livestreamed for free on Youtube. 

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

#MottleyAudio #poetry #knopf #poem-a-day #knopf poetry #national poetry month #poetry month #knopfpoetry #poem #Leila Mottley #woke up no light #what to do when you see a Black woman cry

[theresabookforthat]

#FRIDAY READS: HOW TO WRITE A POEM

When was the last time you wrote a poem? Elementary school? Yesterday? As Natalie Goldberg puts it in her classic book Writing Down the Bones, “poems are small moments of enlightenment.” There’s a poet in each of us and turning experience and feelings into poetry can be cathartic and fun. Inspiration is everywhere – the subway, the sea, the past, the present… Here are some books to help you cross that bridge and fling open those doors of perception: Metaphors be with you!

 FEATURED TITLES

 YOU, TOO, COULD WRITE A POEM by David Orr

A collection of reviews and essays by David Orr, the New York Times poetry columnist and one of the most respected critics in America today, his best work of the past fifteen years in one place. Orr’s prose is devoted to common sense and clarity, and, in every case, he brings to bear an impeccable ear, a genial openhandedness of spirit, and a deep wealth of technical knowledge—to say nothing of his shrewd sense of humor. Orr’s journalism represents a high watermark in the public discussion of literature, and is as pleasurable as it is informative. You, Too, Could Write a Poem is at heart a love note to poetry itself.

 THE ODE LESS TRAVELLED: UNLOCKING THE POET WITHIN by Stephen Fry

Comedian and actor Stephen Fry’s witty and practical guide gives the aspiring poet or student the tools and confidence to write and understand poetry. He believes that if one can speak and read English, one can write poetry. In The Ode Less Travelled, he invites readers to discover the delights of writing poetry for pleasure and provides the tools and confidence to get started.

 LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET by Rainer Maria Rilke

At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for generations of writers and artists of all kinds, including Lady Gaga and Patti Smith.

 WRITING DOWN THE BONES: FREEING THE WRITER WITHIN by Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron

With insight, humor, and practicality, Natalie Goldberg inspires writers and would-be writers to take the leap into writing skillfully and creatively. She sees writing as a practice that helps writers comprehend the value of their lives. The advice in her book, provided in short, easy-to-read chapters with titles that reflect the author’s witty approach (“Writing Is Not a McDonald’s Hamburger,” “Man Eats Car,” “Be an Animal”), will inspire anyone who writes—or who longs to.

 FOR YOUNGER WRITERS

 A KICK IN THE HEAD: AN EVERYDAY GUIDE TO POETIC FORMS by Paul B. Janeczko, Chris Raschka

In this splendid and playful volume — second of a trilogy — an acclaimed creative team presents examples of twenty-nine poetic forms, demonstrating not only the (sometimes bendable) rules of poetry, but also the spirit that brings these forms to life.

 SLEEPING ON THE WING: AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN POETRY WITH ESSAYS ON READING AND WRITING by Kenneth Koch, Kate Farrell

This book is specifically for high school students, though it is useful to college students and anyone interested in the art and craft of poetry. Koch and Farrell, experienced teachers as well as poets, write about poetry in such a way that students will find it accessible and interesting.

 Visit Signature to download The Writer’s Guide to Poetry

Sign-up for Knopf’s Poem-a-Day

#national poetry month #natalie goldberg #there'sabookforthat #penguinrandomhouse #knopfpoetry #poem a day #signature #fridayreads #poetry #poem

[aaknopf]

Martyr!, the poet Kaveh Akbar’s propulsive debut novel, tells the tale of Cyrus Shams, the son of a lost mother (victim of a 1988 U. S. Naval snafu in the Persian Gulf that killed 290 people on a commercial airliner) and the long-suffering father who emigrated to Fort Wayne, IN with his baby boy. We meet Cyrus as a student of poetry at Keady University and a reformed addict. In this excerpt, he’s at the local open mic with his friends; we also share one of the poems from Cyrus’s bookofmartyrs.docx, helpfully supplied by Akbar, the poet behind the fictional poet.

. .

The Naples Tuesday night open mic had become a mainstay of Cyrus and Zee’s friendship. It was a small affair, not much to distinguish it from the myriad other open mics happening elsewhere in the country—except this was their open mic, their organic community of beautiful weirdos—old hippies singing Pete Seeger, trans kids rapping about liberation, passionate spoken-word performances by nurses and teenagers and teachers and cooks. As with any campus open mic, there was the occasional frat dude coming to play sets of smirky acoustic rap covers and overearnest breakup narratives. But even they were welcome, and mostly it felt like a safe little oasis of amongness in the relative desert of their Indiana college town, a healthy way to spend the time they were no longer using to get drunk or high.   Naturally, Naples didn’t have its own sound equipment, so Zee would usually show up fifteen minutes early with his beat-up Yamaha PA to set up for Sad James, who hosted every week. Sad James was called this to distinguish him from DJ James, a guy who cycled nightly through the campus bars. DJ James was not a particularly interesting artist, but he was well-known enough in the campus community to warrant Sad James’s nominative prefix, which began as a joke but somehow stuck, and to which Sad James had grown accustomed with good humor, even occasionally doing small shows under the name. Sad James was a quiet white guy, long blond hair framing his lightly stubbled face, who played intensely solemn electronic songs, punctuated by sparse circuit-bent blips and bloops, and over time at Keady, he had become one of Zee and Cyrus’s most resilient and trusted friends.   On this night, Cyrus had read a poem early, an older experimental piece from a series where he’d been assigning words to each digit 0–9, then using an Excel document to generate a lyric out of those words as the digits appeared in the Fibonacci sequence: “lips sweat teeth lips spread teeth lips drip deep deep sweat skin,” etc. It was bad, but he loved reading them out loud, the rhythms and repeti­tions and weird little riffs that emerged. Sad James did an older piece where the lyrics “burning with the human stain / she dries up, dust in the rain” were repeated and modulated over molten beeps from an old circuit-bent Game Boy. Zee—a drummer in his free time who idolized J Dilla and John Bonham and Max Roach and Zach Hill in equal measure—hadn’t brought anything of his own to perform that evening, but did have a little bongo to help accompany any acoustic acts who wanted it.   On the patio listening to Cyrus talk about his new project, Zee said, “I could see it being a bunch of different poems in the voices of all your different historical martyr obsessions?” Then to Sad James, Zee added, “Cyrus has been plastering our apartment with these big black-and-white printouts of all their terrifying faces. Bobby Sands in our kitchen, Joan of Arc in our hallway.”   Sad James made his eyes get big.   “I just like having them present,” Cyrus said, slumping into his chair. He didn’t add that he’d been reading about them in the library, his mystic martyrs, that he’d taped a great grid of their grayscale printed faces above his bed, half believing it would work like those tapes that promised to teach you Spanish while you slept, that some­how their lived wisdoms would pass into him as he dreamt. Among the Tank Man, Bobby Sands, Falconetti as Joan of Arc, Cyrus had a picture of his parents’ wedding day. His mother, seated in a sleeved white dress, smiling tightly at the camera while his father, in a tacky gray tux, sat grinning next to her holding her hand. Above their heads, a group of attendees held an ornate white sheet. It was the only picture of his mother he had. Next to his mother, his father beamed, bright in a way that made it seem he was radiating the light himself.   Zee went on: “So you could write a poem where Joan of Arc is like, ‘Wow, this fire is so hot’ or whatever. And then a poem where Hussain is like, ‘Wow, sucks that I wouldn’t kneel.’ You know what I mean?”   Cyrus laughed.   “I tried some of that! But see, that’s where it gets corny. What could I possibly say about the martyrdom of Hussain or Joan of Arc or whoever that hasn’t already been said? Or that’s worth saying?”   Sad James asked who Hussain was and Zee quickly explained the trial in the desert, Hussain’s refusing to kneel and being killed for it.   “You know, Hussain’s head is supposedly still buried in Cairo?” Zee said, smiling. “Cairo, which is in which country again?”   Cyrus rolled his eyes at his friend, who was, as Cyrus liked to remind him when he got too greatest-ancient-civilization-on-earth about things, only half Egyptian.   “Damn,” Sad James said. “I would’ve just kneeled and crossed my fingers behind my back. Who am I trying to impress? Later I could call take-backsies. I’d just say I tripped and landed on my knees or something.”   The three friends laughed. Justine, an open mic regular whose Blonde on Blonde–era pea-coat-and-harmonica-rack Bob Dylan act was a mainstay of the open mic, came outside to ask Zee for a cigarette. He obliged her with an American Spirit Yellow, which she lit around the corner as she began speaking into her cell phone.   In moments like these Cyrus still sometimes felt like asking to bum one too—he’d been a pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker before he got sober, and continued his habit even after he’d kicked everything else. “Quit things in the order they’re killing you,” his sponsor, Gabe, told him once. After a year clean he turned his attention to cigarettes, which he finally managed to kick completely by tapering: from one and a half packs a day to a pack to half a pack to five cigarettes and so on until he was just smoking a single cigarette every few days and then, none at all. He could probably get away with bumming the occasional cigarette now and again, but in his mind he was saving that for something momentous: his final moments lying in the grass dying from a gunshot wound, or walking in slow motion away from a burning building.   “So what are you thinking then? A novel? Or like . . . a poetic mar­tyr field guide?” asked Zee.   “I’m really not sure yet. But my whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accom­modate her. That’s what I’m after.”

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.

Browse Kaveh Akbar's poetry collections and follow Kaveh on Instagram @kavehakbar.kavehakbar.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

#poetry #poetry month #national poetry month #Knopfpoetry #Knopf Poetry #Kaveh Akbar #AkbarAudio #Arian Moayed #MoayedAudio #MartyrANovel #Martyr! #Martyr! A Novel #Excerpt

[aaknopf]

A poem of girlhood and after by Indigenous New Zealander Tayi Tibble, whose second collection, Rangikura, comes out in America today. In the dictionary of Māori language, hōmiromiro is defined as “a white-breasted North Island tomtit…a little black-and-white bird with a large head and short tail.” It is often used to refer to someone with a tomtit’s keen vision—that is, a sharp eye for detail.

Hōmiromiro

I used to dream about a two-headed goldfish. I took it for an omen. I smashed a milk bottle open

on a boiling road and watched a three-legged dog lick it up and in the process I became not myself but a single shard of glass and thought finally

I had starved myself skinny enough to slip into the splits of the universe but once I did I realised that the universe was no place for a young thing to be and there is always a lot more starving to be had.

When I was a girl I thought

I was Daisy Buchanan. I read on the train. I made voluminous eyes.

Once I walked in front of a bus and it exploded into a million monarch butterflies then I was ecstatic!

As a girl, I could only fathom

time as rose petals falling down my oesophagus. It tickled and it frightened me. I ran around choking for attention.

I had projections of myself at 100 my neck weathered and adorned like the boards of a home being eaten by the earth.

When I was a girl I would lie

on the side of that road in the last lick of sun and wait for the rabbits to come saluting the sky of orange dust

and then I would shoot them into outer space.

For many years I watched them bouncing on the moon. But then I stopped caring and so I stopped looking.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Rangikura by Tayi Tibble.

Browse other books by Tayi Tibble and follow her on Instagram @paniaofthekeef.

Hear Tayi Tibble and Harryette Mullen read from their new poetry collections at Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, CA on April 10 at 8:00 PM. Tayi Tibble will be joined by Sasha LaPointe in Washington for a series of readings and conversations at Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle on April 13 at 7:00 PM, at King's Books in Tacoma on April 14 at 1:00 PM, at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in Bainbridge on April 15 at 7:00 PM, and at Third Place Books in Seattle, Lake Forest Park, on April 16 at 7:00 PM. Tayi and Sasha will also be at Broadway Books in Portland, OR, on April 17 at 6:00 PM. Tayi will be at the LA Times Book Festival signing books at the ALTA booth (Booth 111) on April 20 at 11:00 AM.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

#TibbleAudio #poetry #knopf #poem-a-day #knopf poetry #national poetry month #poetry month #knopfpoetry #poem #tayi tibble #rangikura #homirmiro

[aaknopf]

Welcome to poetry month! In a time of wars and painful divisions both at home and abroad, we hope in the next thirty days to offer what poetry can: the signal voice of the individual in darkness, the value inherent in truthful seeing, the connection to hearts and minds different from our own. We’ll begin with a powerful connector: Kevin Young, whose volume Stones comes out in paperback this week. Here he reflects on “kith and kin”; throughout the month, we’ll revisit the work of some of our Knopf ancestor kin and celebrate their wisdom alongside the vital contemporary voices.

Kith

All week I have wondered            what kith meant—

always paired            with kin, can it be the same thing?

Kin seems like like, like kind, as in our kind,

us—kindness,            we hope, or something to like.

Kith is more            helpless, married as it is to kin—

Kith is what you find            in the cemetery, names effaced from their graves,

names you may not            know, but share, or share though don’t yet know.

Kith is not            yesterday— that’s ancestry—nor

is it today—kin            keeps that close— no, kith

is tomorrow            & who knows? Is outliving

the dead, but means            the dead too, resting here on the sill

among the blue            bottles—both the flies & the glass

that once held what? Kith is that. The pair

of shoes that still            keep the wearer’s shape after removed—

whether moments ago, dog-tired,            or years later, still standing—

though nobody asked            them to—long beyond when the wearer’s gone.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Stones by Kevin Young.

Browse other books by Kevin Young and follow him on Instagram @thehungryear. 

Join Kevin Young in Cambridge, MA, at the opening of the ARTS FIRST festival, on April 24 at 5pm, when he will receive the 2024 Harvard Arts Medal. The festival (April 24-28, 2024), showcases the creativity of the Harvard arts community through performances, art exhibitions, and art-making activities. 

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

#poetry #knopf #poem-a-day #kevin young #youngaudio #knopf poetry #national poetry month #knopfpoetry #poems #kith #stones

[aaknopf]

#poetry #knopf #poem-a-day #knopf poetry #national poetry month #poetry month #knopfpoetry #poem #poetrybroadside #poetry broadside #Michael Dickman #Pacific Power & Light #Switchflip #Poet

[aaknopf]

Nam Le, celebrated author of The Boat, makes his poetic debut with a collection titled, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. Reading these pieces, which expose the harm, humor, and difficulty of language itself for a Vietnamese refugee living in the West, we come across far more than thirty-six ways of understanding Le’s diasporic experience. Number 17, offered here, centers the kitchen as a place of generational knowledge and boundary-crossing.

[17. Culinary]

(OFFERTORY)

I put a little...                        see if you can guess

sweet or bitter—                        how know one without the other?

longan, mangosteen     sapodilla                       star anise & lotus seed

something from the karstic north                        but with Western tang

passed on from my mother                        and her mother     and hers...

blood ligament     of kitchen labour                        wisdom     all compressed

into this blank deep-strata rock.                        Yes, the geode pulses

with secret inward gleams                        but it stays silent.

Until now!     Until me!                        My tongue rings all!

I am loud with every flavour, every humour,                        equally of north, south, east, west

and     as she made me                        I will make you, mother.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem and The Boat by Nam Le.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

#LeAudio #poetry #poem-a-day #knopf poetry #national poetry month #knopfpoetry #poem #Nam Le #Culinary #poetry month

[aaknopf]

In the prologue to Spectral Evidence, Pulitzer winner Gregory Pardlo’s new collection, he writes, “This book is about the legal means by which fear is used to rationalize the persecution of people imagined to be in league with the possessed of supernatural forces. This book argues that the logic used to rationalize the prosecution of witches is the same logic that rationalizes vigilantism and police street justice.” He goes on to consider that both Black men and white women are “similarly pressed into service as both muse and monster in the Western cultural imagination,” while, at their ghostly intersection, the patriarchy is haunted by “the omnipresent but rarely named” Black woman. 

One iconic example, brought forth in these shimmering poems of the self as shaped by (and shaping) American history, is Tituba, the only woman of color to be accused in the Salem witch trials.

Occult

Zero your scales to the burden of a lash, Dear Justice, but let Tituba clumsy the Magistrates’ minds with a wag of her wizened index. A flight risk near forests of the Wampanoag where Christians savaged Queen Weetamoo’s corpse, what else might Tituba, nonwhite and woman, haunt but a margin of error? She’s a catbird’s song trapped in the chimney. She’s egg whites in water, she is the tumescence of smoke. Dear Mami Wata, let Tituba prove to be the stone that splits the stream of their vision. Let her renounce sight and be unseen. Let her cough ground coral in the shedding of a pewter moon, that she, of all the innocents, should live. Dear Three-headed Hecate, replace her, the unthought thought, with wax, twigs, horse hair and straw. Let her not appear as a witness. Nor as evidence. As with the talking dog, let her be the hoodoo that speaks through their mirrors. Let a hang-thread skein of yarn ghost the floorboards tempting a red cat—his familiars, the devil and his counsel, the canary. Let her conjure the man in black they fear who charms pilgrims on the road to paradise, disguised as a harmless birdwatcher. Dear Nemesis, let her feed the court a few names from his register—a taste of her truth, her mise en abyme, her one hell that calls forth another. With no standing on her own behalf, let her sit in judgment. Let this power invested of gavel and oath help her give birth through her mouth like a god.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Spectral Evidence by Gregory Pardlo.

Browse other books by Gregory Pardlo and follow him on Twitter @pardlo.

Click here for a special NYPL recording of Imani Perry and Gregory Pardlo in conversation about Spectral Evidence. 

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

#poetry #knopf #poem-a-day #knopf poetry #national poetry month #poetry month #knopfpoetry #poem #Pardloaudio #Gregory Pardlo #spectral evidence #occult

[aaknopf]

Understanding the imprint of her mother on her body and soul has been one of the encompassing projects of the poetry of Sharon Olds. Over the years, her poems have explored the child’s desire to protect itself from harm, as well as the grown daughter’s imperative to tell the truth about the mothering she received and, into her later age, to try to forgive.

Tender Bitter

When I started having tender thoughts about myself as a child—that long, pointed chin, those tiny eyes—I started having tender thoughts of my mother. She would look up, a lot—short for an adult— with a look of dazed longing, her fine straight hair wrapped wet around many small rollers, and bound back with combs put in backward, to give her hair some height, or with a fillet like a goddess. My hair was loopy, soft, lollopy like flop-eared rabbits’ ears, she wrote about it in my Baby Book, “Shar’s not conventionally beautiful—but that naturally curly hair!” I don’t think she would have traded with me, she remembered her cold Pilgrim mother, in my mom’s sleep, slipping the bobby-pins out of the dreaming child’s spit curls. We were big on trading—you were supposed to want to take Jesus’s place on the cross, as he had taken yours. I think my mother would have died for me— and I think I would have died for her— is that how the other animals do it? Who dies for whom? My mom sometimes liked my mind—the odd things I said—she would write about my mind in my pink Baby Book. She came from ignorant educated people of self-importance and leisure. She did not see that what I said was funny, like joking, it was metaphor. But it charmed her. She would not have taken it from me, she would not have known what to do with it, nor did she want to mar me, as her mother had marred her. My mother . . . loved me. If she had not beaten me, I would have been purely enamored with her—she was so sad, and pretty. Her eyes were a hundred bright bright blues, like a butterfly’s scales but crystal electric, like a shattered turquoise goblet. She did not take away my ability to love—with her elder sister, and my elder sister, she taught it to me. And she did not take my mind—the one thing of value I was born with—my mother did not take the simile away from me.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Balladz by Sharon Olds.

Browse other books by Sharon Olds.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

#poetry #knopf #poem-a-day #knopf poetry #national poetry month #poetry month #knopfpoetry #poem #Sharon Olds #OldsAudio #Balladz #Tender Bitter

[aaknopf]

#poetrybroadside #poetrybroadsides #poetry broadside #jane hirshfield #the asking #to drink #poem #poem a day #knopfpoetry #knopf poetry

[aaknopf]

#poetry #knopf #poem-a-day #knopf poetry #national poetry month #poetry month #knopfpoetry #poem #poetrybroadside #Friedrich Schegel #Sunset

[aaknopf]

#poetry #knopf #poem-a-day #knopf poetry #national poetry month #poetry month #knopfpoetry #poem #poetrybroadside #Martyr! #Kaveh Akbar #Cyrus Shams

[aaknopf]

The Asking: New and Selected Poems covers half a century's poetry-making by Jane Hirshfield, who shapes whole worlds of feeling—and moves between idea and image—with startling economy.

To Drink

I want to gather your darkness in my hands, to cup it like water and drink. I want this in the same way as I want to touch your cheek— it is the same— the way a moth will come to the bedroom window in late September, beating and beating its wings against cold glass; the way a horse will lower its long head to water, and drink, and pause to lift its head and look, and drink again, taking everything in with the water, everything.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about The Asking by Jane Hirshfield.

Browse other books by Jane Hirshfield and follow her @janehirshfield on Facebook.

Click here to see a recording of Jane Hirshfield deliver this year's annual Blaney Lecture for the Academy of American Poets, "Making the Invisible Visible." [link will be available after March 19]. Jane will give the keynote speech at The Sierra Poetry Festival in Nevada City, CA on April 13 and will hold a conversation on climate change at the Tiburon Public Library with Science Friday host Ira Flatow in Tiburon, CA on April 19 at 6:30 PM.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

#poetry #knopf #poem-a-day #knopfpoetry #HirshfieldAudio #poems #knopf poetry #the asking #jane hirshfield #poem #to drink

[aaknopf]

Anne Michaels is a poet and novelist of passion and history—history that inevitably encompasses violence and loss, but also the possibility of beauty and connection in their midst. In her new novel Held, set during World War One and across the century to follow, the descriptions crystallize line by line with the immediacy and sharp physical awareness of her fine lyric poems. We supply the opening here—the novel’s first stanza.

River Escaut, Cambrai, France, 1917

We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?

*

The shadow of a bird moved across the hill; he could not see the bird.

*

Certain thoughts comforted him:    Desire permeates everything; nothing human can be cleansed of it.    We can only think about the unknown in terms of the known.    The speed of light cannot reference time.    The past exists as a present moment.    Perhaps the most important things we know cannot be proven.    He did not believe that the mystery at the heart of things was amorphous or vague or a discrepancy, but a place in us for something absolutely precise. He did not believe in filling that space with religion or science, but in leaving it intact; like silence, or speechlessness, or duration.    Perhaps death was Lagrangian, perhaps it could be defined by the principle of stationary action.    Asymptotic.    Mist smouldered like cremation fires in the rain.

*

It was possible that the blast had taken his hearing. There were no trees to identify the wind, no wind, he thought, at all. Was it raining? John could see the air glistening, but he couldn’t feel it on his face.

*

The mist erased all it touched.

*

Through the curtain of his breath he saw a flash, a shout of light.

 *

It was very cold.    Somewhere out there were his precious boots, his feet. He should get up and look for them.    When had he eaten last?    He was not hungry.

*

Memory seeping.

*

The snow fell, night and day, into the night again. Silent streets; impossible to drive. They decided they would walk to each other across the city and meet in the middle.    The sky, even at ten o’clock at night, was porcelain, a pale solid from which the snow detached and fell. The cold was cleansing, a benediction. They would each leave at the same time and keep to their route, they would keep walking until they found each other. 

*

In the distance, in the heavy snowfall, John saw fragm­ents of her—elliptic, stroboscopic—Helena’s dark hat, her gloves. It was hard yet to tell how far away she was. He shook the snow from his hat so she might see him too. Yes, she lifted her arms above her head to wave. Only her hat and gloves and the powdery yellow blur of the streetlamps were visible against the whiteness of sky and earth. He could barely feel his feet or his fingers, but the rest of him was warm, almost hot, from walking. He pulsed with the sight of her, the vestige of her. She was everything that mattered to him. He felt inviolable trust. They were close now but could not make their way any faster. Somewhere between the library and the bank, they gripped each other as if they were the only two humans left in the world.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Held by Anne Michaels.

Browse other fiction and poetry collections by Anne Michaels here.

Click here to view a note from Anne Michaels about the questions at the heart of Held.  

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

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[aaknopf]

A multi-generational saga courses across the pages of Ædnan, by Sámi-Swedish author Linnea Axelsson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel. The verse epic follows an Indigenous Sámi family who have herded reindeer for generations, as the forces of colonialism and modern development of their ancestral lands threaten their culture and livelihood. The story is told by a small chorus of characters from the 1910s through the current day, and we become especially close to Lise, who left her Sámi family, following her brother Jon-Henrik, to be educated at a residential school for “Nomad” children. This excerpt from Chapter XII takes place in the early 1970s, along the Great Lule River Valley, where the state-owned Vattenfall company was developing hydroelectric resources, and Lise is graduating into a world unimaginable to her parents.

. .

The river climbed silently up the hills

as soon as Vattenfall whistled it came creeping:

–

Streamed backwards up its deep channel and drowned the earth

When the great Suorva Dam for the third time was to be regulated

–

Entreaty

shone from Mama’s eyes

–

She explained clearly to the Swedes 

that the fishing will suffer if the water rises

–

There was probably no one who understood what she was saying

– –

After the social studies lesson I went with the others to sit on the gymnasium floor

–

Almost all of Malmberget’s students had been dismissed from class

– To participate in the miners’ strike meeting

 –

Someone had heard that Olof Palme was coming

that he would travel all the way up here 

–

To the mining company’s and Vattenfall’s world the one that he himself had helped build

–

It is what he is guarding

It is all that he can see

–

The mine boss’s voice

flowed wildly above the crowded hall which was hot with bodies

–

His voice was so robust his conviction so intense

–

I glanced at Anne who was sitting beside me leaning against the wall bars

and she smiled back at me

–

Soon we would be leaving school too 

–

And could start working join the union

–

You took the job you wanted that’s all there was to it 

– 

Switchboard cleaner or cook

with the old folks at the Pioneer or the children in day care

– –

I spend the weekend up at Mama and Papa’s 

–

I stand with Jon-Henrik

 –

Watching the river flow murky across the slope

–

That brushy slope

where he and I used to go it’s underwater now

 –

How are our tracks ever to be heard Among the Swedes’ roads and power stations

–

It’s Jon-Henrik who says this he had also been drawn down to the dam

–

To work for Vattenfall as soon as school was done

 –

I’m surprised when he says

That he’d preferred to have taken up with the reindeer

–

Been elected into the Sámi community

And learned to guide that wandering gray soft ocean across the world of the fells

–

Just as the lot of us were once taught at the Nomad School that this is what the Sámi do

that this is how we all live

–

He laughs and says:

–

Who knows what the spring flood will bring with it

this drowned  earth may yet be fertile

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Ædnan by Linnea Axelsson.

Check out The Rumpus for a conversation between Linnea Axelsson and Susan Devan Harness about Axelsson's Sámi heritage and the decision to write Ædnan in verse. 

Click here to read Linnea Axelsson's op-ed piece for LitHub on Scandinavia’s hidden history of Indigenous oppression.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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[aaknopf]

In Shakespeare’s Sisters, Ramie Targoff recovers to literary memory the lives and talents of four women who wrote in England during Shakespeare’s time, well before there was any notion of “a room of one’s own.” From Mary Sidney, sister of the well-known poet Sir Philip Sidney (she wrote most of the beautiful translations of the Psalms ascribed to him) to Anne Clifford, a diarist and memoirist who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to disinherit her from her family’s land, these women stun us by their bravery. In the passage below, Targoff discusses the important poetry of Aemilia Lanyer, born of an illiterate mother and an immigrant father; it appeared in print in 1611, making her the first woman in the 17th century to publish an original book of verse.

. . .

In the same year the King James Bible first appeared in print, establishing the most influential English translation of scripture ever produced, Aemilia dared to tell a different story. Over the course of 230 rhyming stanzas of eight lines each, her “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” lays out the story of Christ’s Passion from a distinctly female perspective. The formal challenge of writing the poem was itself daunting: it’s no easy feat to compose over 1,800 lines of ottava rima (iambic pentameter stanzas written in an abababcc rhyme scheme). But Aemilia’s greater audacity was in tackling the subject of Christ’s crucifixion. To justify this, she makes the same claim for divine inspiration that the great Protestant poet John Milton would make sixty or so years later in writing Paradise Lost. Describing her own “poor barren brain” as “far too weak” for the task, she asks God to “give me power and strength to write”:

Yet if he please to illuminate my spirit,  And give me wisdom from his holy hill,  That I may write part of his glorious merit,  If he vouchsafe to guide my hand and quill Then will I tell of that sad blackfaced night,  Whose mourning Mantle covered Heavenly Light.

     Given the fact that the poem proceeds to do exactly what she petitions for, Aemilia shows her reader that her prayer has been answered: she’s not so much writing as channeling the divine word.[...]      Aemilia’s narrative of Christ’s Passion begins on the “very night our Savior was betrayed.” As part of her overall strategy in “Salve Deus”of celebrating female virtue, the poem draws attention both to the wicked acts of men (Caiaphas, Judas) and to the compassionate acts of women (the daughters of Jerusalem, the Virgin Mary) in the days leading up to Christ’s arrest. None of this comes as a surprise. But when Aemilia arrives at the moment that Pontius Pilate considers Christ’s fate, she does something totally unanticipated. Relinquishing her own role as narrator, she hands the poem over to Pilate’s wife. Among the most minor figures in the New Testament, Pilate’s wife has a single line of verse in only one of the four gospels. In Matthew 27:19, a woman who is never named urges her husband, the Roman governor in Judaea, to disregard the will of the people calling for Christ to be crucified: “Have nothing to do with that just man,” she warns Pilate, “for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.”      In early Christian commentaries and apocryphal writings, this woman was often called Procula Claudia, or simply Procula. In medieval England, Procula was paraded onstage in the mystery plays as an evil woman who almost prevented Christ’s saving humankind; in the York Cycle’s play named for her—The Dream of Pilate’s Wife—Percula, as she’s called there, receives her dream from the Devil himself. There’s no way to know if Aemilia knew this or other medieval dramas; it’s more likely she would have noticed the more positive treatment Pilate’s wife was given in the Geneva Bible, the popular translation done by English Protestants in the 1550s. Consistent with the Protestant belief that everyone should have access to the Bible directly, the translation was heavily glossed with marginal notes. Next to the verse from Matthew regarding Pilate’s wife was a single gloss suggesting that Pilate should have taken the “counsel of others to defend Christ’s innocence.” But whether the treatment of this woman was negative or positive, she had never been asked to perform the role Aemilia gave her in “Salve Deus,” where she delivers one of the strongest defenses for women’s rights that Christianity had ever seen.      In Pilate’s wife, Aemilia found her perfect heroine: a woman whose intervention at the crucial moment could have changed the course of history, if only her husband had listened. With the scriptural verse from Matthew before her, Aemilia made two crucial additions to the story. First, she transformed Pilate’s wife into a faithful believer who already regarded Christ as her Lord. “Hear the words of thy most worthy wife,” she begs her husband, “who sends to thee, to beg her Savior’s life.” Far from simply reporting that she’s had an ominous dream, as she does in Matthew, Pilate’s wife explicitly warns Pilate that he will be killing the son of God.      Second, Aemilia turned Pilate’s wife into a proto-feminist. After urging Pilate to let Christ go on religious grounds, she comes up with a new reason for why he should be pardoned: “Let not us women glory in men’s fall / Who had power given to over-rule us all.” If men are sinful enough to crucify their savior, then women should be liberated from men’s rule. “Your indiscretion sets us free,” she declares, “And makes our former fault much less appear.” In these four short lines, Aemilia’s character anticipates the killing of Christ as the basis for women’s freedom from patriarchy.      As if this weren’t radical enough, Pilate’s wife moves in “Salve Deus” from making her argument about the Crucifixion to recon- sidering the reason for Christ’s sacrifice in the first place. “Our mother Eve,” she exclaims,

. . . who tasted of the Tree Giving to Adam what she held most dear, Was simply good, and had no power to see,  The after-coming harm did not appear.

If Eve had no way to know the damage she might do, Adam was only too aware: it was he who received the command directly “from God’s mouth.” Eve was simply a victim of misinformation and “too much love,” whereas Adam, not betrayed by the “subtle Serpent’s falsehood,” knew exactly what he was doing.      Aemilia was certainly not the first person to defend Eve on grounds of her innocence or to propose that Adam be held responsible for the Fall. She was possibly the first to argue that the crime of killing Christ so overwhelmed any fault of Eve’s that women’s subordination should come to an immediate end. “If unjustly you condemn [Christ] to die,” Pilate’s wife concludes,

. . . Then let us have our Liberty again, And challenge [attribute] to your selves no Sovereignty;  You came not in the world without our pain, Make that a bar against your cruelty; Your fault being greater, why should you disdain  Our being your equals, free from tyranny? If one weak woman simply did offend,  This sin of yours, hath no excuse, nor end.

Hundreds of years before the women’s liberation movement, Aemilia used the figure of Pilate’s wife to argue that the sexes should be equal. In doing so, she also rescued a voice from history, giving full personhood and agency to a woman whom the Bible didn’t regard as worthy of a name.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Shakespeare’s Sisters by Ramie Targoff.

Browse other books by Ramie Targoff and follow her on Instagram @ramietargoff.

Hear Ramie Targoff read at the Boston Athenaeum in Boston on May 15, 6:00 - 7:00 PM. Click here to join virtually. 

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

#poetry #knopf #poem-a-day #knopf poetry #national poetry month #poetry month #knopfpoetry #poem #ramie targoff #targoffaudio #shakespeare's sisters #shakespeare