Paul Baerman

W.S. Merwin’s “Rain Travel”

Here’s a clever and beautiful poem from 1993. I’ve added line numbers for convenience. Setting: a dark bedroom in the speaker’s home. Visual gloom—dark, black, night, sightless—characterizes the first 11 lines, and after a transformation we return to darkness at the end, but now with a tremendous shout. From the outset the diction suggests passivity… Continue reading W.S. Merwin’s “Rain Travel”

How I Came to Cross the Jabbok

By midafternoon we’d come to the river beyond which Esau’s henchmen lay, The banks bright with chittering poplars and a vista of wild olives and tulips, pines and reeds. Gazelles nibbled the grass while larks and finches fiddled with their fledglings. I stayed behind my entourage, sent them all across in groups by different routes… Continue reading How I Came to Cross the Jabbok

The other I

I think I mentioned my Biblical work-in-progress. I’m still circling and circling like a hawk watching Jacob and the angel brawling below me, but I need to get closer in order to finish the poem so my talented friend Simon Kaplan can perform it in a couple weeks. Well, if not “finish” then “bring to… Continue reading The other I

More about hyphens

I continue to ruminate on yesterday’s Marianne Moore poem. Although it’s not hard for me to see why other 20th century poets valued and imitated her on many fronts, clearly I’m both charmed and uneasy about one particular aspect of her technique–the end-line (and particularly the end-of-stanza) hyphens. I hinted at the reason in my… Continue reading More about hyphens

A cool line-break

I thrill to Marianne Moore’s animal poems, and I wish I’d discovered “The Pangolin” before including a pangolin character in one of my Christmas pageants a few years ago. (“My tongue is longer than my body! Wanna see?”) However, Grasshopper, today’s lesson comes from Moore’s “The Buffalo” (1934), which has the unusually humorous line and… Continue reading A cool line-break

Thinking syntax

I quite like Emily Khilfeh’s “Ekphrasis On ‘The New York Times’ Headline ‘Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom’,” which I find especially moving and especially well crafted. The Palestinian topic was outside my experience yet accessible to me. Oh, here’s a related and interesting interview she did. It all led me to this,… Continue reading Thinking syntax

Wait, you get to decide what you like?

My reading of verse this year has been sometimes depressing, since I’ll never be able to write like, say, Wallace Stevens; it’s also made me angry given the pretentious, self-absorbed habits of some contemporary poets bred in the hothouses of writing programs where novelty was valued more highly than rigor or sense (pace Flannery O’Connor),… Continue reading Wait, you get to decide what you like?

Being messy

I always feel reassured when I see other writers’ first drafts, since they look kind of like mine–hopeless. On the other hand, Ben Jonson commented that his friend Shakespeare never revised, though readers then and now agree that sometimes he should have. We have it on no lesser an authority than Ernest Hemingway that the… Continue reading Being messy

From poem to lyric?

Not every poem can be easily or beautifully set to music. A few years ago I read Auden’s Christmas Oratorio with great excitement, but it’s not hard to see why Benjamin Britten reneged on his promise to write music for it: I’m pretty sure it would have been longer than The Ring Cycle! Today I… Continue reading From poem to lyric?

Louis MacNeice

I’ve begun studying Autumn Journal (1939) with great love. Though shorter, it’s every bit as brilliant as Tennyson’s In Memoriam or Wordsworth’s Prelude. I have to take my time to read the sections over and over, noticing and appreciating different things on each read—diction, rhythm, assonance, consonance, rhyme, closure, the power and pathos. I’m sorry… Continue reading Louis MacNeice