Poem: “Dear James Wright,” by Sarah Dravec

Source: Dressing Room Poetry Journal

Favorite Line/Phrase: “James Wright, I want to know how it feels to have someone look at you and love you without any awareness of the monster you really are.”

Response: I don’t really understand prose poetry.  I don’t know how you know, as a poet, that your words and ideas need that vessel, since I am always thinking with line breaks in mind.  But here it works.  It reads so quickly, this telling of a secret.  Yet the clarity and weight of the moment feels more like poetry than prose.  I don’t know that is done.  But I like it.

Poem: “Ghosts on the Road” by David Rivard

Source: Poem a Day from poets.org

Favorite line/phrase:  “I think the need/ gets stronger, he said, it/ just gets stronger.”

Response:  This poem tricked me.  It felt too simple at first, too aware of its own intentions.  Then it swerved, and in swerving my heart became involved.  Don’t let my favorite line fool you, in the context of the poem, it packs a real wallop.

Poem: “Northern Corn” by Anders Carlson-Wee

Source: Litragger

Favorite Line/Phrase: “He pours/ rye whiskey from a thermos and sips/ the lidless excess of his private noon.”

Reflection: This summer, Andrew Hudgins talked about how dangerous it is to think you know where a poem needs to go.  This poems feels both completely necessary but also like a revelation.  Like there was no way to foresee the conclusion, but also that no other conclusion could be reached.  I wonder how much it surprised the poet.  It is a good reminder to me how satisfying surprises in poetry can be, how narrative and image can live side by side in a line, both pushing a poem forward.

Poem: “Knot” by Sarah Levine

Source: Green Mountains Review

Favorite Line/Phrase: “I stuffed your hair/ in my jacket pocket.”

Response: What an amazing first two lines.  What an amazing first stanza.  That hooks me.  And reminds me how simple and elegant a great beginning is.  I don’t know if I love the reference to the “heart,” but the poem certainly works hard to earn it.  And it doesn’t end there, thank goodness!

Poem: “Ekdekhesthai” by Emilia Phillips

Source: West Branch

Favorite Line/Phrase: “Sometimes I half/ expect to peel a clementine/ & find nothing inside.”

Response: Worth noting that my high school Ancient Greek failed me here, and I had to look up the title.  It means “to take up” and forms most of our term, synecdoche.  The two things I love most in this poem are the line breaks and the balance between daily, earthily details and profound contemplation.  I will need to read this one quite a few more times.

Poem: “The Dress”

Poet: Mark Strand

Source: Collected Poems: Mark Strand- bought new at Crow Bookstore in Burlington, VT

Favorite Line/phrase: “But if you step out of your dress and move into the shade,/ the mole will find you, and will the owl, and so will the poem,/ and you will fall into another darkness, one you will find/ yourself making and remaking until it is perfect.”

Response: For some reason, this reminds me of my favorite poem, “Hematite Lake,” by James Galvin.  The idea of darkness or nightfall being a home runs through both and calls to me for reasons I can’t quite name.  Maybe that is why we read poems, to have others name what we cannot.