Conch by Zbigniew Herbert * Landon Godfrey’s book, Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown (Cider Press, 2011), was awarded the Cider Press Review Book Award. Godfrey is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council 2011-2012 Artist Fellowship.
This essay will offer a more antique example of what many authors demonstrate in Structure & Surprise— that, although critical and pedagogical attention to structures rather than forms in poetry, and to turns especially, may be relatively recent, the practice of poetic turns is ubiquitous, so much so as to be considered an essential part of the art. Unsurprising, then, to discover that poets have used turns in their writing and have benefited from their effects for a very long time. Arguably no turn is more stark and noticeable than the ironic turn, when an outlook or tone that has been carefully developed and, for the moment, sounds whole-hearted— only to be suddenly undercut, as the poem’s initial, apparent aim is reversed or abandoned.…
A rake in the garden. The garden… by Joshua Beckman Most lyric poems, as other contributions to Voltage shrewdly and ably attest, derive rhetorical shape and structure from one of two core architectonic strategies: “turning” or “leaping.” Of course, this is by no means a perfect taxonomy—certain poems, such as Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Torso of an Archaic Apollo” or James Wright’s “Lying on a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” would seem, in their last lines, at least, to straddle the boundary. These terms are often used interchangeably or are bundled together under a perhaps more general heading (the “pivot,” e.g.), but in actuality they derive from disparate mechanics; classically speaking, “turning” is an outgrowth of hypotactic organization and procedure,…
Sambatyon And ink is the name of your spirit – Abulafia Even as the flux swelled and rushed headlong he stared hard at the furious script of foam, and could have sworn someone had tripped and scattered the alphabet into the strong brew of gravel and sand that left him short of breath, and threw him for a loop, as he bared his heart to the white waters that flared and ripped a window to the mind’s retort. Now he could move on into the open field, heaven knows how a free fall of words rained from the skies, or was it a roll- call of molten sounds that rose unchosen from his lips – truly a language…
Fabio Morabito is a poet who lives in Mexico City. Though he was born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Italian parents, and spent his youth in Italy, all of his poetry has been written in Spanish. In his fourth book of poems, Delante de un prado una vaca (Before a Field a Cow), Fabio Morabito uses the image of looking out of the window multiple times. Many of his poems take place indoors and looking out the window has a powerful effect of representing everything beyond those doors. Thus, several of his poems have interesting twists, like this one: THEY ALL ran to look out, except me. Something, the shade under which I was, the book I read, a soft laziness… They all went…
Passenger† by Jorie Graham In “Passenger,” a post-9/11 poem from the collection Overlord, Jorie Graham, through various shifts of personal deixis, attempts to bring imagination and empathy together. One might ask immediately, what does empathy have to do with sudden shifts of deixis? Deixis belongs to orientational features of language, as it grounds the language in specific time and place. Isaac Revzinconsiders deixis an indispensable part of human communication, calling it “the primordial function of gesture.”1 Deixis best exemplifies a bodily-oriented dimension of language. It is precisely through the sudden turns of personal deixis that Graham creates the relationship between the speaker of the poem and the poem’s other character. Through the shift of personal deixis, Graham conveys the process of thinking involved…
Sleeping in Dick Cheney’s Bed† by Brian Turner I first encountered Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” as the text set for a literature analysis exam in high school. I sat in the last seat of the row farthest from the door; it was easy to steal a glance out the window behind me. Across the valley, beyond the line of winter-lit trees edging the hilltop campus, the clustered spires of Frederick, Maryland spiked against the snow-filled sky. The timer on the teacher’s desk clicked on as pens scratched against paper. When the wind picked up, the plastic sheeting that lined the wall of windows to keep in the heat crackled like a surreal metronome. By then, I’d watched my mother starch…
Match Game ’73 Too racy for the Game Show Network but fair game for the Internet, the episode asks a question so simple, the missing word is on the lips of oh so many silent players: The police commissioner said, “I think Batman and Robin are _______.” Our contestant Sandy tries to disappear inside her royal-and-mauve tartan blouse. She grabs her brow, delighting our sponsor Excedrin. Begrudgingly, she speaks: Queer. Then applause, laughter, relief. Self-deprecation courtesy of Richard Dawson, in porn ‘stache and sideburns. Gene Rayburn passes the potato to Bobby Van, who gives Sandy a match with QUEER on his card. Van’s wife Elaine Joyce displays QUEERS. Another green triangle lights up for Sandy. Charles Nelson Reilly of all people gets it wrong. Dawson and Brett Somers pour on…
When the Neighbors Fight, . The trumpet’s mouth is apology. …………We sit listening To Kind of Blue. Miles Davis …………Beat his wife. It hurts To know the music is better…………Than him. The wall Is damaged skin. Tears can purify…………The heart. Even the soft Kiss can bite. Miles Davis beat …………His wife. It’s muffled In the jazz, the struggle …………With good & bad. The wall Is damaged skin. The horn knows …………A serious fear. Your tongue burns pushing …………Into my ear. Miles Davis Beat his wife. No one called…………The cops until the music Stopped. The heart is a muted …………Horn. The horn is a bleeding Wife. Tonight our neighbors are a score ………..Of danger. You open My shirt like a door you want …………To enter.…
The Rain by Zbigniew Herbert . This is a poem that turns and keeps turning. Who is this “older brother” returned from war? Which war? What kind of return? War’s aftermath, or really its unending presence, was an inevitable subject for Polish poets in the decades after 1945, and Zbigniew Herbert slyly begins “The Rain” by introducing one more returned soldier, a member of the family, an older brother decorated with a real and metaphorical silver star. But the star, the wound, is the poem’s first turning, an abyss we fall into, because it’s not even the recent war of shared memory that he’s returning from, but World War I, and not just that, he’s a survivor of the Napoleonic Wars, the fifteenth-century battle…
Voltage Poetry