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Life Studies is Robert Lowell's best-​known and most influential book. It won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960. I read it in 1962 and I hated it. In a shallow way, my dislike was a matter of social class. I said aloud to Lowell's book, "Yeah, I had a grandfather, too." Like my fellow would-​be urban Beatniks at Rutgers, I preferred the manners of Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish"-​the poet reading the Hebrew prayer for the dead while listening to Ray Charles and walking the streets of Greenwich Village.

A year later, when I arrived as a graduate student at Stanford, I entered a culture more bucolic than what I had known at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey-​the home state of Ginsberg, with urban New Brunswick about an hour from those Village streets. Surrounding the sleepy Palo Alto of those days, an actual village, the future Silicon Valley was still a place of horse ranches and apricot orchards. Leland and Jane Stanford had founded the university on their ranch, in 1891, and the school's affectionate nickname for itself was "the Farm." In Palo Alto, too, as in the quite different literary and urban terrain of Rutgers, Robert Lowell's poetry was not held in the first rank of importance.

But five or six years later, in 1970, I took a job teaching at Wellesley College, not far from Boston and Cambridge, where I met poets who considered Life Studies a major work of art. For my impressive new friends Frank Bidart, Gail Mazur and Lloyd Schwartz, Lowell was the great living model of a poet. Life Studies had been transforming for them. A book I didn't like, and for years ignored, had opened new possibilities for people I admired.

Rejecting Life Studies on first encounter was partly a conventional reflex, an automatic dislike for inherited privilege.

Rejecting Life Studies on first encounter was partly a conventional reflex, an automatic dislike for inherited privilege. But the resistance I felt goes deeper, involving qualities of idiom and imagery, and-​even more-​their cultural implications. In the personal narratives and declarations of Life Studies, many readers valued a directness that for me lacked an antic, disjunctive quality I prized in American life and poetry. Lowell's autobiographical poems felt humorless and foursquare. They were not enough like the movies of Mel Brooks or the eruptive comic strips of Walt Kelly.

It was not just social class. Leaving aside laugh-​out-​loud comedy, an example in poetry of what I mean is the work of Marianne Moore. The social voice in her poem "Silence" is not exactly working class or ethnic. On the contrary, that poem begins:

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard..."

After quoting her father's distinctly upper-​middle-​class assertion, Moore presents a memorably outlandish, inexplicable image for self-​reliance: a cat with "the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth." The image comes from left field, mixing different registers of attention (Longfellow, glass flowers, shoelace) with an insouciance I find inspiring. Lowell, I thought, would never come up with that cat.

The oblique collision Moore creates between her father's social place and the cat's prey has a quality I admire in the work of Alan Dugan, whose Poems and Poems 2 came out around the same time as Life Studies. Dugan's books were much more my speed. His (possibly legendary) ancestor Old Billy Blue Balls was wounded so he had "two ass-​holes." Dugan has him say, "The North won the Civil War / without much help from me / although I wear a proof / of the war's obscenity" ("Fabrication of Ancestors."). Life Studies was more decorous.

The manic moods of Dugan, Ginsberg and Moore in their different ways included a sense of the ridiculous. Lowell's mania felt more somber and grand. Maybe those other poets were simply more appealing for a child of Sylvia Pinsky, with her rude jokes about Ruthie Edelstein's ass filling up a picture window-​not a Lowell image.

Another poet I valued more than Lowell was Elizabeth Bishop. Her poetry had a recklessly candid darkness I loved. For example, the lonely interior landscape Bishop creates in "Crusoe in England"-​a symbolic self-​portrait without vanity-​is not heroic or wistful. The island is harsh, monotonous, infertile and volcanic. More directly autobiographical, the childhood memory of Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" has a humdrum surface so completely realized that it can contain "rivulets of fire," cannibalism ("long pig") and horrifying breasts. Bishop's tough, sardonic way of writing about herself was bracing.

In the same spirit, I relished Dugan's "How We Heard the Name," a poem in the voice of a drunken soldier floating downriver on a log, addressing locals gaping at him from the banks of the river. Floating by, along with that laughing soldier and his log, are:

dead horses, dead men
and military debris,
indicative of war
or official acts upstream

The pair "war / or official acts" pleased me, and I liked how the river was also history and how the laughing, disrespectful soldier was also Alan Dugan himself.

Over the years, I mostly outgrew my dissenting first impression of Life Studies. I learned to appreciate the somber, restless music, for example, of "Skunk Hour," with "A car radio bleats / "Love, O careless love," and the garbage-​scavenging mother skunk in the book's last lines that "jabs her wedge-​head in a cup / of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, / and will not scare."

Was my difference from those Cambridge friends partly regional? After I left Wellesley, returning to California in 1980, I discovered my Berkeley students were indifferent to Lowell's work. Theirs was a mellow version of my irritation with all those proper names, lines like "The farm, entitled Char-​de-​sa / in the Social Register, / was named for my Grandfather's children," in a poem entitled "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow." The young Californians in my Berkeley classes didn't say to the book, "Yeah, I had an uncle too." Mildly, they explained to one another that Lowell's concentration on his family history was an East Coast thing.

Moving between the coasts a few times has taught me about the way works of art, like people, might have different stature in different social settings. In the 1980s it was a story of two Roberts. Among young poets and academics in Boston, Robert Duncan was a little-​read, peculiar figure on the outskirts of attention, while Robert Lowell was a major artist, his work a central, commanding presence. For the young poets in Berkeley, and for my colleagues in the English Department there, Duncan's writing was a vital achievement at the center of living poetry. I remember Duncan stalking through a hallway in Berkeley's Wheeler Hall to visit someone's class, wearing a cape, like the superhero he was in that place and time.

Moving between the coasts a few times has taught me about the way works of art, like people, might have different stature in different social settings.

East and West, I missed out on some good things because of the shyness or arrogance, or whatever it was, that kept me from ever completely joining the life of either Boston or the Bay Area. In Berkeley, I witnessed my social group's devotion to good food, natural fibers, elegant sporting goods and hikes in Wildcat Canyon-​a consumer paradise that brought out the skeptical, New Jersey sourpuss in me, even as I took pleasure in the food and the scenery.

In a mild, privileged way I was a Kirk Pettiford on either coast, an outsider with a discordant knack for certain things. It could be that my origins were too remote in spirit from both Cambridge and Berkeley. I try to comfort myself with one of the first things Homer tells about the most human of all the heroes, in the first lines of the Odyssey: "He saw the cities of many peoples and he learnt their ways." Unheroic, but something to aspire to, I tell myself. I treasure the poet Tony Hoagland's words in a review of my first book: "What has six arms, an enormous appetite, and roams over the earth devouring experience with omnivorous reverence? The poet Robert Pinsky, that's who." I cling to the idea of "omnivorous reverence" and to the verb "roams."

Or maybe that's a rationalization for what I missed by not getting the apprenticeship of attachment to an older poet in the generation of John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich-​in other words, the contemporary poetry of those days. I read poems by those living seniors, but never as their devoted student in the way I was a devoted student-​as-​reader of the earlier Modernist generation of T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, H.D. and Ezra Pound. Whether Pound would like it or not, he was now my Ezra Pound, my flawed but vital teacher.

I had read Williams's statement that when he was young he memorized Francis Turner Palgrave's old-​fashioned The Golden Treasury, a large, popular anthology of historical poetry. Williams's memory of that early attachment made me feel better about my efforts to study as an apprentice of dead poets from Fulke Greville and George Gascoigne to Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Whatever the terms mean, I was more interested in "poetry" than I was in "contemporary poetry."

When people heard I was working on a book about contemporary poetry, I remember questions like, "Will there be a chapter on the Confessionals?" Um, no. "On the Beats?" Well, it's not that kind of book. "Chapters on Dickey, Plath, Berryman, Bishop, Olson?" No.

I could see from the person's face a gradual conclusion that I wasn't really writing a book, just pretending. When I finished The Situation of Poetry I resisted the publisher's urging to re-​title it something snappy like Poetry Now or Poetry Today. The book makes unlikely pairings, comparing Allen Ginsberg with George Gascoigne, Sylvia Plath with John Clare, Frank Bidart with J. V. Cunningham, Louise Bogan with Frank O'Hara. The single poem with the most pages is Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." (Second most, James McMichael's "Itinerary.") If I were a thirty-​year-​old writing the book today I might compare the feeling of "wonder" as a noun in poems by Danez Smith and Ben Jonson. I write about Lowell not as "confessional" but in relation to quoting and dramatic monologues.

For my poet friends in Cambridge, Lowell's central importance was embodied by his Office Hours-​the initial caps seem right for those unique sessions he ran in a seminar room at Harvard. That weekly event was an erratic writing workshop, with interjected lectures. About thirty people, many of them Office Hours regulars, most of them not actual Harvard students, sat at a big central table or in chairs around the room's perimeter. Each week, various people brought photocopies of a poem they had written. After an awkward pause one of those people, maybe someone chosen by Lowell but sometimes a confident soul volunteering spontaneously, would hand out copies of their poem.

I did not live in Cambridge but in subsidized housing for married faculty at Wellesley College, out in the suburbs. With a full teaching schedule and three children, I could not have gotten into town for those peculiar séances if I wanted to-​which I did not. But one semester when I was on leave from Wellesley, just back from a year in London and not yet teaching, I did attend two or three times.

It was impressive to hear Lowell responding with his daffy insight, often allusive, to those photocopied poems. Sometimes well-​known poets who had published books brought their new work to the Office Hours, with Lowell in a double role as peer and master. He managed that duality with his habit of drifting to enlarge any question or example. I respected how he would bring up unexpected comparisons to William Blake or to Edna St. Vincent Millay-​all in his peculiar accent, sort of quasi-​Southern, a unique personal invention. Somebody told me the fabricated drawl was Lowell's way to disavow Boston by resisting its manner of speaking.

For all his eccentricities-​famously abundant-​Lowell had class.

At one of the sessions I attended, encouraged by my friends, I brought in a poem, and Lowell praised it. What he said I can't remember precisely, but I'm sure he wove my poem into his endless, thrilling and obsessive ruminations about poetry. Nothing was more important than the art and its history. In conversation he might at any moment erupt into an interrogation:

"Where is Alexander Pope's best writing, do you think?"

And then, while you were still fumbling for an answer:

"Many people might say the 'Essay on Criticism,' written when he was practically a teenager, but politicians and everybody else are always quoting the 'Essay on Man.' "

My other memory from those visits to the Office Hours was a moment when I disagreed with Lowell. It wasn't as bad as my saying, "I'm surprised at your ignorance," to Mr. Kolibas back in the eighth grade, or the high school duel with Mr. Pulaski. Whatever I said was more like, "I disagree" or "I think you're wrong about that." What I remember is not anything Lowell said next, but a kind of choral gasp from the room as a whole. I was breaking a rule.

Lowell himself more or less shrugged. For all his eccentricities-​famously abundant-​Lowell had class. My guess is, he was amused by the absurdity of the mouthy, overconfident young Wellesley professor, by the audible shock of his own followers at that reckless dissent, and by his own boredom while presiding over the moment. He later wrote an excellent blurb for Sadness And Happiness, my first book of poetry, even though he knew I did not admire his work intensely, the way Frank, Lloyd, Gail and many others did. Maybe he taught me a lesson that Mr. Pulaski had not, and I was still too raw and silly to get it.

Lowell could be funny in a digressive, absurdist way. Somebody's poem reminded him of the time Julius Caesar stopped his entourage outside the house of Cicero so the two of them could chat about literature. The horses and soldiers and palanquins and sycophants waited in the street while inside Cicero's place Caesar and his frequent opponent talked about writing. Lowell described the scene in that peculiar drawl-​without-​a-​region, pinwheel eyes behind his glasses, with no transition between scholarship and goofy riffs. I remember how he threw in the name of a contemporary rival:

"And so Caesar and Cicero talked while all the nobodies waited outside. The two of them chatted-​you know, they chatted about good prose and about oratory, and about the writers and politicians they both knew. They gossiped about Jim Dickey."

For me, the West Coast alternative to Lowell was not Robert Duncan but Yvor Winters, my teacher at Stanford in the years between Rutgers and the days of Wellesley College and the Lowell Office Hours. When I went to California that first time, the farthest west I had been was Flemington, New Jersey. I had only a vague idea who Winters was. I knew his reputation as a rigid, conservative academic, a stiff and graceless prig. Shortly after arriving in Palo Alto, before meeting Winters or taking a class with him, I read his essay "Robert Frost: The Spiritual Drifter as Poet."

"And fuck you very much!" I said to the book. I actually threw it across the room. The essay was a dismantling of Frost's philosophical evasions, his hints and feints toward the Emersonian thinking that Winters considered a fatally sloppy, anti-​intellectual current in American culture. Even while praising Wallace Stevens or Mina Loy as great poets, he called attention to defects in their ideas.

For them, poetry meant the entire, monumental history of the art, not just the mere local neighborhood in time of their contemporaries.

His customary line was that he had read every poem by every poet of any reputation who wrote in English, and had made his own judgments. If you wanted to disagree with him, you ought to do the same. He and Lowell both had a total, undiluted concentration on poetry-​nothing was more important, for either of them. For them, poetry meant the entire, monumental history of the art, not just the mere local neighborhood in time of their contemporaries. Thanks to Winters, I learned to read the sixteenth and seventeenth century poets whose work I love. George Gascoigne's longish poem "Gascoigne's Woodmanship," with the poet's account of his failures and sincerities, moved me.

Even while throwing his book across the room, I was surprised by the subversive, comical grace of Winters's prose. His sentences with their outrageous opinions and poses were light on their feet in a way that reminded me of Oliver Hardy dancing with defiantly ironic elegance, the fat man possibly a better hoofer than Stan Laurel, in their duets. Unlike Hardy, Winters could be vicious as well as nimble:

The only important difference between a chimpanzee and a professor of English is that the professor has a greater command of language. The professor may think himself more handsome, but the chimp thinks otherwise, and the chimp is beyond argument the better athlete. The chimp, of course, would not admit the one kind of superiority which belongs to the professor, because he does not know what it is. The only important difference between the professor and a distinguished poet is that the poet has a greater command of language; but few professors will admit this difference, because almost none understand the nature of the difference-​it is for this reason that nearly all are so feeble when they come to the defense of their profession.

He was a dominant figure within his Palo Alto corral in a way completely different from Lowell's centrality in Cambridge. Lowell was an eccentric magnet. Winters was a relentless dictator. He imposed his often crazy literary opinions onto his Stanford disciples, known as the Wintersians, and they saluted. I can remember arguing in his seminar, in defiance of the Wintersian line, that William Butler Yeats was a better poet than T. Sturge Moore. Winters had said the opposite. The disciples in the room smirked at my error.

But I learned more about poetry from Yvor Winters than from any other teacher.

_____________________________________

Excerpted from Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet by Robert Pinsky. Copyright © 2022. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.

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Poetry and Social Class: Robert Pinsky on His Many Readings of Robert Lowell

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Life Studies is Robert Lowell's best-​known and most influential book. It won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960. I read it in 1962 and I hated it. In a shallow way, my dislike was a matter of social class. I said aloud to Lowell's book, "Yeah, I had a grandfather, too."

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"We find it hard to settle our brains down,
and poetry offers us that silence, that quiet space,
and allows us to reconnect with ourselves, with an idea, or with an emotion."
Ada Limón

Ada Limón is the 24thU.S.Poet Laureate and the 1st Latina to hold the position. Her work has also won the National Books Critics Circle Award and earned her a Guggenheim fellowship. Limón serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte and is the host of The Slowdown podcast. You can read more about Ada Limón here.

Poems of focus:

Skills of focus:

This lesson is fitting for both high school and middle school classrooms. Students will discover and explore Limón's work via a mini poet study using 3 of her poems. You can find the full lesson here. The link will force you to make a copy of the Google Slides, so you can save them to your personal drive and edit them for your needs.
Today's lesson is brought to you by Ann Cox. Ann has over 20 years of experience teaching high school English, including AP Lit, Creative Writing, and Speech. She also spent several years as a teacher consultant for the Illinois State Writing Project. In addition to the #TeachLivingPoets website, Ann has also written for ReadWriteThink and Moving Writers.

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"We find it hard to settle our brains down, and poetry offers us that silence, that quiet space, and allows us to reconnect with ourselves, with an idea, or with an emotion."Ada Limón Ada Limón is the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate and the 1st Latina to hold the position.

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‎Poetry Unbound: Michael Kleber-Diggs - Gloria Mundi on Apple Podcasts

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Is there life after death? This poem says yes: where one life is part of a cycle of life that continues.

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Since we're big fans of poetry here at Book Riot, we've put together this list of thirty quotes about poetry!

"A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him." -Dylan Thomas

"All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, 'Something's wrong, let's change it for the better.'" -Sonia Sanchez

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." -T.S. Eliot

"I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program." -Billy Collins

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." -Emily Dickinson

"It was at that age, that poetry came in search of me." -Pablo Neruda

"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." -Virginia Woolf

"One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk." -Charles Baudelaire

"Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry." -Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

"Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down." -Mahmoud Darwish

"Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow." -A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

https://www.instagram.com/p/BPcM5ttgYnJ/

"Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth." -June Jordan

"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat." -Robert Frost

"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance." -Carl Sandburg

"Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief-everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies." -F. Sionil Jose

"Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone." -Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful." -Rita Dove

"Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers." -Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness." -Alice Walker

"Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings." -W.H. Auden

"Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals." -Sylvia Plath

"Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it begins as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth." -Mary Oliver

"The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems." -Margaret Atwood

"The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth." -Jean Cocteau

"The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness." -James Gates Percival

"To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul." -Susan Vreeland

"When I began to listen to poetry, it's when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to other. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else." -Joy Harjo

"There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes

"You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart." -Carol Ann Duffy

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry." -Emily Dickinson

If these quotes about poetry have inspired you, we've got you covered! Here are 58 love poems to read right now. Or if you're short on time, we have short poems so you can sneak more poetry into your life.

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Since we're big fans of poetry here at Book Riot, we've put together this list of thirty quotes about poetry! "A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.

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David Wagoner – Lost | The On Being Project

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Pádraig Ó Tuama: Friends, thanks very much for listening to Poetry Unbound, whether you're new or you've listened to them all - your attention makes everything worthwhile. And I've got some news: I've written a book, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World. There's 50 poems, each with a fresh essay written by me. I'd love if you pre-order it, or pre-order a few, and join up to our free interactive newsletter. Links to everything at poetryunbound.org.

[ music: "Praise the Rain" by Gautam Srikishan]

My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and one time, I was walking through New York City with a new friend. And we were talking about poetry, both poets, and I said, Oh, there's this poem by David Wagoner that I love. And she looked at me, and at the same time, we both said, "Lost." And then she thumped me with her umbrella, because, she said, How did you know this is my favorite poem? And I didn't. I was just saying it's one of my favorite poems. And we recited this poem to each other, standing there. It was raining, people were going by, it was dark, there were lights, there was noise, and reciting David Wagoner's poem "Lost" to each other was a way of finding friendship, as well as finding location in the middle of a city filled with so much movement.

[ music: "Praise the Rain" by Gautam Srikishan]

"Lost" by David Wagoner:

"Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you."

[ music: "The Willows" by Gautam Srikishan]

The first time I read this poem, the advice went into me in a way that made me look at the world differently, totally differently. "Wherever you are is called Here, / And you must treat it as a powerful stranger." What amazing advice - it's not saying, oh, and it's lovely, or, oh, and it's diabolical. "A powerful stranger."

I've used this poem over years, with different groups that I've worked with, and said to them before we read it, What advice would you give to yourself when you're lost? And some people know themselves enough to say, Well, calm down, or, Retrace your steps, or, Don't panic, or, Don't wait too long before you ask for help.

This poem is written in the imperative, the tense that you use in grammar to give an order: sit down, stand up, go out, come in. The first line of the poem is just two words: "Stand still," it's written from a voice that isn't sentimental. It seems to be caring, because it's caring about whoever is lost - the "me," I suppose; the person being addressed.

But there's a sense that the person is lost, and perhaps not only lost, but then distressed that they're lost. And this poem has a voice in it that's calling your attention, to say, Just because you're lost, it doesn't mean that you have to be distressed. And even if you are lost, there's something to be found there.

The only time we hear a verb conjugated in the first person in this poem is when the poem is allowing the forest to speak. "The forest breathes. / Listen. It answers, / I have made this place around you. / If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here." What an amazing thing, "I have made this place around you."

I don't think that I'd ever thought about a forest speaking and that a forest isn't lost to itself. The metaphor of lostness the whole way throughout this poem is speaking to so many different circumstances.

Something happens in us when we're lost. We go into old muscle memories, sometimes funny, sometimes calm, sometimes distressed, sometimes making the concern about being lost even worse. And I think this is so interesting for all of us to reflect on: what am I like when I'm lost?

[ music: "Catching Water" by Gautam Srikishan]

So the poem makes use of a great device, which is repetition. The word "you" is repeated 11 times, but there's other things that are repeated, as well. "Stand still," for instance, repeated twice, and then, "No two are the same to" is repeated, almost like a calming mantra. "No two trees are the same to Raven. / No two branches are the same to Wren." And in this way, one of the things that the poem is doing is setting up a certain kind of pattern and a certain kind of recognizability to the ear, almost like a music, and, as well, to the eye as you're reading it. And this, too, is providing a map - a map to say, Look at what's here. Look at all of these things in relation to each other. The raven and the wren are not lost, and you don't need to be, either, because look at the pattern that's here. And recognize that it might be your distress that's making your lostness feel worse. It could perhaps be that if you're able to gather yourself, that you can find a certain kind of strength. The word "lost" is repeated throughout this, as well.

Over and over again, this poem does that, these little unfolding codes that are there, waiting to be seen, if you can only see it and if you can only put aside whatever feeling you have in association with being lost, and begin to pay attention. And if you can't do that, if you can't pay attention to those patterns, then, this poem is saying, well, then, you are surely lost.

And so observation, paying attention, noticing, being where you are and finding a way to not let your feeling about your feeling be the only thing you're paying attention to - seeing what is at home in the place where you call lost - that might be the thing that realizes that you are not lost and that there is a way forward.

[ music: "Memoriam" by Gautam Srikishan]

"Lost" can mean so many things. Like, I lost my data on my computer. Or you can talk about losing your innocence, or you can say, It's lost to me, if somebody says something that you don't comprehend or don't want to comprehend. You can say, I lost the plot. Certainly, we say that here, when we're talking about maybe losing control. Amazing ways within which this simple word, "lost," can mean so many different things.

And how is it that the word "lost" crops up in your life? Is it that you want to be lost, actually? Somebody once said to me that in relation to religion that I come across like I'm totally lost. And I took it as a deep compliment. I was delighted, because I have no interest in being found. "I once was lost, but now I'm found" is a phrase that echoes throughout so much hymnody in the Christianities of the world. And I sometimes have deep suspicion of the idea of being found, because I am interested, perhaps artistically, in the idea about what happens when you know you're not found. What do you begin to observe?

One of the things that struck me over the years of using this poem when I do group work is, in the midst of all the instructions, so many people take different instructions for themselves. They hear what they most need to hear in the lines of the poem. I'm so curious as to what people hear in it, what you take away. Where, today, where in this season of your life, where, or wherever you are, is it you find this poem speaking to you? Is it in the "Stand still"? Is it in the "No two trees are the same to Raven"? Is it in the single-word sentence, "Listen"? What is it? I'm so interested to know where it is that this magnificent poem strikes you.

[ music: "The Willows" by Gautam Srikishan]

"Lost" by David Wagoner:

"Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you."

[ music: "Praise the Rain" by Gautam Srikishan]

Chris Heagle: "Lost" comes from David Wagoner's book Collected Poems, 1956-1976. Thank you to University of Illinois Press, who gave us permission to use David's poem. Read it on our website at onbeing.org.

[ music: "Praise the Rain" by Gautam Srikishan]

Poetry Unbound is: Gautam Srikishan, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Amy Chatelaine, Kayla Edwards, and me, Chris Heagle.

Our music is composed and provided by Gautam Srikishan and Blue Dot Sessions.

This podcast is produced by On Being Studios, which is located on Dakota land. Open your world to poetry with us by subscribing to our Substack newsletter at poetryunbound.org. You may also enjoy our other podcast On Being with Krista Tippett, or our newsletter, The Pause. Visit us at onbeing.org to find out more.

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David Wagoner - Lost | The On Being Project

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Pádraig Ó Tuama: Friends, thanks very much for listening to Poetry Unbound, whether you're new or you've listened to them all - your attention makes everything worthwhile. And I've got some news: I've written a book, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World. There's 50 poems, each with a fresh essay written by me.

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THE DEAD OF SEPTEMBER II | Vanity Fair | November 2011

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1. "Winter Trees" by William Carlos Williams
Deciduous trees, "attiring" and "disattiring," are the main characters in this short poem. Just why do these "wise trees" shed their leaves in the autumn? The poem contains at least the hint of a scientific answer-and a lovely basis for further discussion.

2. "Astronomy Lesson" by Alan Shapiro
While their parents watch TV shows in different rooms, two brothers stand on the front porch, staring at the night sky. The older boy talks about the numberless stars and the black space that goes on forever, a space that may go on in their lives as well. Scientific metaphors include light-years, solar winds, black holes, and the cooling sun. What will happen to these two "sad Ptolemies"-and to all of us-if everything turns cold?

3. "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" by Walt Whitman
In this classic poem, the speaker hears a scientist lecturing, presenting proofs, charts, and diagrams about the stars. Soon the poet grows weary and ventures outside to look up "in perfect silence at the stars." The poem, while valuing scientific knowledge, speaks to the value of direct experience, both in science and in life.

4. "Poker Star" by Richard Brautigan
Everyone learns about the constellations in school, but who first named them? In this whimsical poem, Brautigan makes up his own story about a constellation, imagining a poker game among sheepherders. Students may want to invent their own constellation myths as well!

5. "Information" by David Ignatow
In this prose poem, Ignatow spoofs-and celebrates-the scientific method, as his speaker counts all two million and seventy-five thousand leaves on a single tree, proving that one tree is finite. Is this as meaningful as counting stars, as astronomers do? Why or why not? And should we count the hairs on our heads as well? Bombarded as we are by information, how do we decide which facts are important and which are not?

6. "Who Has Seen the Wind" by Christina Rossetti
No one has seen the wind, the poet says, but we all know it's there. This is a perfect introduction to the ways in which scientists explore the unknown, the seen and the unseen-from wind to atoms and viruses. It also speaks to the different varieties of scientific and sense-related experience. How do we know the wind exists? What about unseen stars or insects?

7. "The Bear" by Susan Mitchell
A choosy female bear dominates this poem, as she wanders from log to log looking for a place to sleep for the winter. She finds it finally, as we find a sweet epiphany-and an introduction to a science lesson on hibernation.

8. "The Blue Booby" by James Tate
Here we get a description of the life and habits of that denizen of the Galapagos, the blue booby. Is Tate's blue booby the same animal as the blue-footed booby? If so, how much of what Tate writes about the bird is true? And how much comes from his imagination? Are his details the sort that scientists actually collect? Ask students to research the blue-footed booby on their own. What do they learn? Do they prefer the basic facts or Tate's version?

9. "Damselfly, Trout, Heron" by John Engels
This beautiful poem, more difficult than the others on this list, explores the food chain, as the damselfly is eaten by the trout, which is in turn eaten by the heron. By the end of the poem, even the heron has died, "beyond reach on the far side of the river." The poem can lead to discussion of natural enemies and the necessity of both predators and prey in our ecosystem.

10. "The Meadow Mouse" by Theodore Roethke
Prey and predators come into focus once again in this moving poem about an orphaned baby mouse rescued from a field. By poem's end, the mouse has escaped from its nursery shoe-box into the wild, where it will live or die, courtesy of the hawk, the great owl, the shrike, the snake, and the cat. Yet a greater predator looms over this poem-humanity itself. How is man affecting the natural world today? And how is nature answering back?

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Ten Poems to Get You Through Science Class This... | Poetry Foundation

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‎The Slowdown: 714: A Personality Test on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show The Slowdown, Ep 714: A Personality Test - Jul 8, 2022

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Poukahangatus by Tayi Tibble (Penguin, £10.99)
In Vampires Versus Werewolves, the poet remembers schooldays of "brown boys running round topless during PE"; when white girls take them home, it is "to see if parents would bare their teeth". The role reversal is typical of the fairytales of youth in the Aotearoan/New Zealand poet's debut collection. Tibble writes wittily of the hunger games of adolescence, with needy boys crying wolf (those beasts again) while "in reverse you cry sheep and / nobody believes your bleating". Identities are assumed and discarded ("there is a dark-skinned darkness in me / I wear her like a little black dress"), and form a central focus of the autofictional long poem Shame. "Tell me, am I navigating correctly?" Tibble asks in Identity Politics. Her worries are misplaced: however lost their youthful personas, these wise poems know exactly where they are heading.

Rookie: Selected Poems by Caroline Bird (Carcanet, £12.99)
Bird's debut was published when she was 15, and stands up sufficiently well for 15 pages from it to appear in Rookie. Bird's narratives often proceed at breakneck speed, like the flies in Detox with their "one second" life expectancy. Doubling is a strong theme, as in Mary-Jane, who was "born as identical twins", or Kissing, with its "two teardrops racing down opposite faces / of the same hypocrite". In Nancy and the Torpedo, from the Forward prize-winning The Air Year, Nancy hugs a torpedo and explains to her partner "Can't you see I'm exploding for the both of us?" These are poems that go off like a great big rocket in the sky.

One Language by Anastasia Taylor-Lind (Smith An Afghan refugee falls to his doom from the undercarriage of a plane: "Like Bruegel's Icarus, he touches down with a splash". As a photojournalist who works in war zones, Taylor-Lind uses aesthetic distance as a spell against harm, as when the poet and a colleague role play their deaths: "We took it in turns who was doing the dying / and who was doing the cradling." On more personal occasions, distance collapses into something rawer, as in the elegies for the poet's father and poems on domestic violence in the book's second half. Ultimately it is Taylor-Lind's eye for the telling detail that stands out, as when hair salons in Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus close and "women's roots are as long as the war, a grey inch for each month".

Sonnets for Albert by Anthony Joseph (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
"My father died with his mouth open - / gasping for air", we read in Shame. After much silence and absence in life, the poet's father is painstakingly restored in death in a book-length "calypso sonnet" sequence. Albert is a rogue, and encounters with him often take place on the run, as when a brother of the poet catches him at the wheel of a van in traffic in Trinidad. Albert responds by badmouthing his brother to the poet: "they way he does talk proper English, Tony, / he talking more English than you!" Others have respectability, but Albert has style and mystique. Joseph's relationship with his father is profoundly ambivalent, but Sonnets for Albert movingly makes peace with his shade: Albert has "made his cycle", an aunt tells the poet, "and that was all that was required of him".

High Desert by André Naffis-Sahely (Bloodaxe, £10.99)
"There is no better backdrop / for the mirage / of permanent boom times than the desert." As landscapes go, deserts are more interchangeable than most, and Naffis-Sahely's visions of dereliction are eerily arid and universal at once. Identities are layered one on top of another as the poet moves from continent to continent; the seal of the Islamic Republic is "planted atop / the Shah's lion" on his father's passport in The Last Communist. Naffis-Sahely has edited a book on Michael Hofmann and, like Hofmann, writes poems imbued with the density of good short stories. Ierapetra, The Train to St Petersburg and The Year of One Thousand Fires are full of civilised world-weariness. This is fierce writing too: litanies of the lost, dispatches from desperate outposts and borders. "True migrants ought to be buried upright / like the Kurdish warriors of old", we read in Folie à Trois: in an inert and supine world, these are impeccably upright poems.

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Poukahangatus by Tayi Tibble (Penguin, £10.99) In Vampires Versus Werewolves, the poet remembers schooldays of "brown boys running round topless during PE"; when white girls take them home, it is "to see if parents would bare their teeth". The role reversal is typical of the fairytales of youth in the Aotearoan/New Zealand poet's debut collection.

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Overnight the figs got moldy and look like little brains-
or Ids without structure-that say something dark
about our species not really laying down a garden
but living out the violent myths.
An insect chorus, almost diaphanous
in a neighbor's yard, says something, too:
America began in tall ships that glowed from within,
but, for the wretched, it still wretchedeth every day.
As the bright day goes around the sun,
why do our days grow
more aggressive and difficult?
Why do the world's shadows
come so close
as its wonders beckon?

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Overnight the figs got moldy and look like little brains-or Ids without structure-that say something darkabout our species not really laying down a gardenbut living out the violent myths.An insect chorus, almost diaphanousin a neighbor's yard, says something, too: America began in tall ships that glowed from within, but, for the wretched, it still wretchedeth every day.

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Ruined Things
BY ALLISON JOSEPH

Growing up, I learned to see ruined things as normal,
almost beautiful: rusted cars forsaken in driveways,

faded awnings flapping loose over two-story brick
storefronts, letters in neon signs flickering, burning

out. I learned to follow the ecstatic swirls and curves
of graffiti on walls, loving the mutant alphabet

sprayed on by street artists, letters swollen as clouds,
puffy hieroglyphs. And every empty lot was strewn

with what people has failed to take with them,
dumped, I thought, for me to explore, poke

with a sharp, whittled stick: shreds of skin mags
torn in the underbrush, clothes ripped to rags

snagged among tree branches, blown tires
and dented hubcaps spread out like a welcome

in my neighborhood’s arid patches,
Bronx land the city left unclaimed.

Nothing wrong in being worn, eroded under
urban sun and soot, colors muted in subway

stops, bus stations, dirt and rust and wear
all honorable to me, every new building sagging

eventually, every new school soon marked
by any and every color that could be sprayed on.

Nothing left pristine in that city-scape I loved,
nothing clean or clean in all I remember—lives

punctuated by the jagged symmetry
of wrecked windows, broken barbed wire.


(Sent from Poesie: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1332841582)

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'Ante body' asks us to be more open to the world

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In her new collection, Egypt-born poet Marwa Helal plays with language to challenge the way we approach our problems. The poet wants us to be more open and curious, so that we can better understand how we see the world and what connects us to one another.

The book - her second collection - is called Ante body. It includes an invented writing form called 'The Arabic', first introduced by the writer in her 2016 poem, titled "poem to be read from right to left." Here's how that poem begins -

language first my learned i
second
see see
for mistaken am i native
go i everywhere

"It's such a simple form," Helal says. "This is just the direction that Arabic is written in, as [are] many other languages. And even English has roots in these right-to-left languages that are often erased in our etymology."

Helal's attention to language comes from being bilingual - learning to speak and read both English and Arabic from a young age.

"And of course, the gaslighting that happens in this country with that," Helal adds. "Where, as soon as you open your mouth and you're not a native speaker, there's a kind of immediate disregard, regardless of the accuracy of what you're saying or the construction with which you say it."

So, by changing the way one might expect to read the poem in English, Helal wants to reposition the reader's view of the text.

"And what happens when you do that is you're actually rewiring [the reader] to move through the world the way one who's bilingual might move through the world," Helal says. "And the advantage is that we see so many more possibilities."

With this openness, Helal hopes that we'll be more compassionate towards one another. The title of the collection draws from poet and scholar Fred Moten's concept of "the Ante." The term "ante" indicates what comes "before" the "anti" - which is an antithesis, or opposition.

"Ante body. That body becomes a representation of all bodies," Helal says. "And you take on the struggles of, maybe, workers who do work that you have never had to do."

The poet's examination of language comes right back to this possibility of unbridled connection to one another. In Ante body, Helal uses her invented form in the long poem "Who Real؟". An excerpt reads -

words english of number the counting of tired grew i wrote i
capture to takes it
another in one
writing of tired grown have i now but
limitations inherent your towards

With more openness towards our challenges - whether they are institutional, within a community, or even within a family or relationship - the poet hopes the reader will see this compassion too.

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'Ante body' asks us to be more open to the world

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In her new collection, Egypt-born poet Marwa Helal plays with language to challenge the way we approach our problems. The poet wants us to be more open and curious, so that we can better understand how we see the world and what connects us to one another.

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Netting
BY ELIZABETH BRADFIELD

She wants so badly to catch something, net held
over a reflecting eddy. She’s pulled in
jewel-eyed frogs, their toes
splayed on the canoe’s smooth hull,
throats throbbing. She’s captured
small snails and, once, some roe, but mostly
just bottom muck, silt, and thickening leaves. Again,

into the water lilies and duckweed, the heavy sack
of ooze deep within the net’s bell, weight
unexpected as a breast’s warm heft. Inside, mummichogs
and sticklebacks torque themselves and she sifts
through the black spill for shrimp. The net
bends heavy from her hand,
spills over. Reach into my chest,

into the bone sieve where I keep my heart, and this
is what you’ll find. Substance black,
thick, and silken: staining the lines of your skin,
smelling potent and determined,
shot through with green ribbons of grass,
silver things twitching and gasping in it,
remarkable and ready in seconds to drown.


(Sent from Poesie: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1332841582)

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Specimen
BY ELIZABETH BRADFIELD

The jars themselves
were lovely. Fluted top and rounded
stopper, a few drops of condensation
pearled above the fill line.

How little we would see were it not
for context, or, more specifically, things
out of context. Flowers in a vase,
bears in a zoo, bottled fish
in a museum. The fish

inside, recurved on themselves, tails hooked
along the wall. Surreal and gorgeous—

as fluids and dyes had made
the skin and muscled flesh translucent,
the bones blue, the cartilage lines
of spine and jaw magenta.

The eye was ghostly, the gills
just a shadow of white, and
the ribs reached, their grasping
so obvious. And the tail

pulling the body to its closure.
The fins’ thin stays, like the bones
of a fan. the blue kernel
of otolith floating behind the eye, waiting
to vibrate with sound.

And the whole thing
swollen by the glass that held it.
You’ve never seen the body so clearly articulated,
so clearly pressed against its confines.
Have I wanted enough from this world?


(Sent from Poesie: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1332841582)

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Sci-Fi
BY TRACY K. SMITH

There will be no edges, but curves.
Clean lines pointing only forward.

History, with its hard spine 

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Maybe give extra credit for "Poetry Notes." Students document the poems of the day and their reactions to them.

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“Sundown Walks to the Edge of the Story,” by Joy Harjo | The New Yorker

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“Sundown Walks to the Edge of the Story”

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“In the lands of forgotten memories, / I hear a woman singing.”

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Ilya Kaminsky on Lesyk Panaisuk's Poetry
"Russian soldiers stayed in our building," the poet Lesyk Panaisuk wrote to me a few weeks ago. When the war began, Lesyk left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian invasion.

"War will live in Bucha long after the soldiers are gone," Lesyk emails me, "because they left a lot of mines throughout Bucha." Now it is dangerous to walk around the town. Lesyk's neighbors found some mines in the halls of their building, inside their slippers and washing machines. Some neighbors returned only to install doors and windows. "In our neighbourhood doors to almost every apartment were broken by russian soldiers," Lesyk writes.

This is a window into the horror that is the current invasion of Ukraine: in the middle of the ransacked city of Bucha stands a house whose owners couldn't return to it for a while, not only because of mines and grenades left by russian troops, but also because of radiation.

Lesyk writes that coming from north of the Kyiv region, some of the soldiers went through the Chornobyl zone and, unfortunately, took some things with them to Bucha (for instance, a flask with radioactive substance stolen from the Chornobyl nuclear plant was found by a Bucha citizen in his household after the liberation). Particles of invisible war keep on living in the rooms of people's houses even after the soldiers left.

How can poetry describe something like this?

How can any language speak of a country that's bombarded while the rest of the world looks on?

"A Ukrainian word / is ambushed: through the broken window of / a letter д other countries watch how a letter і / loses its head" writes Lesyk in one of his poems. He continues: "how / the roof of a letter м / falls through"

These days, Lesyk hometown, Bucha, is often shown in the news. "We see our house, our broken windows, dead people," he writes to me of seeing his own street flash on the TV screen: "dead people, someone was shot in the street, someone was tortured. A man with his ears and nose cut off was found in our complex-he was our neighbor. Graves and dead bodies-everywhere on streets we walked almost every day."

"Bucha was a city where artists, scientists, doctors lived," he writes. It was a small, cozy town with a beautiful landscape. People came here looking for a quiet life, they came here to start and raise families. And now I don't know how to live here and not remember everyday what happened.

"The war is one long unbearable day," he writes. "It is a day that cannot end: time in war is sewn together from continuous anticipation and constant action. We are waiting for the air raid alarm, waiting for the news from the front, waiting for the opportunity to escape. We write."

The language in his vivid, image-laden poems, becomes the character, the living being:

There is so much pain, in this music of witness, in this surreal-no, not surreal, it is all too real-testimony that is also a dreamscape made by fear and stress and anger. This song that is also a silent scream, an elegy that is also a shout of protest, this love letter to his country that is also a brick tossed at a helicopter. Here, readers, is a poet whose work won't be easy to forget.
Forgetfulness is unacceptable.

Lesyk Panasiuk,
versions from Ukrainian by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris

OUR FACES, TOSSED ABOUT THIS LAND I II
Please explain this poem a soldier asks our neighbors
while tossing
them against walls
Asks our neighbors to explain a line break
while raping our wives a third time a fourth time a fifth
asks children
of our neighbors to explain while they are locked up in the basement

Our faces tremble
As if from the wind
ІІІ
And this poem about our faces
tossed around in the backyard is a flame
so Russian soldiers finally can gulp their soup.
ІV
Russian soldiers decide to entertain
other Russian soldiers by showing off our children's photo albums

Hey, this one, see? In a bunny costume, an idiot
unlike me here in a military costume
and me again in paratrooper's costume
and me a sailor
bunnies they are a funny nation
and here he hugs the toy dog just like a girl
but I, yes, I, I had a long sword
and I had a gun
and I ran with a rifle
they these funny people, hug dogs what a strange pictures
hey watch how the fire laughs

And so the childhoods is flames and school years are flames
their charred particles fly up and drop on our faces scattered about in the backyard
V
Russian soldiers are like worms yes like worms they are crawling out from their
black soil of Russia
to die in the puddles of tears on this Ukrainian street

But no laughter
is heard
No laughter on the lips of our faces which are tossed about in the backyards.

RUSSIAN ACCORDION
O the accordion of a municipal bus!
your insides
are clattering with our silences which
we take from our apartments to factories and offices and take it
from work
back home
and from home to hospitals and from hospitals to groceries.

Silence is our national currency thousand pink tongues pay
for one little injustice.

The bus driver
puts his index finger to his oily lips.

Lesyk Panasiuk is a Ukrainian writer, translator, designer and performance artist. Author of 3 poetry books (in Ukrainian), books in translation published in Romanian and Russian, individual works translated into 19 languages. Translator and co-translator of books by Valzhyna Mort, Siarhey Prylutski, Dmitry Kuzmin, Artem Werle and 3 anthologies of Belarusian literature. Laureate of various literary contests. Scholar of the President of Ukraine stipend for writers (2019). Resident and scholar of international residences for writers and translators in Latvia (Ventspils, 2019) and Poland (Warsaw, 2021).

Translators: Katie Farris is the author of Standing in The Forrest of Being Alive, which is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2023. Her previous collection, A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving was published by Beloit Poetry Journal as the winner of Chad Walsh Poetry Prize.

Ilya Kaminsky is the poet and translator, author of most recently Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press). He lives in Atlanta.

Featured Artwork:
Bodydock, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
EnergyButterfly, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
EnergyButterfly, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
NASA/Kjell Lindgren, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
EnergyButterfly, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
EnergyButterfly, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Михайло Пецкович, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Medoffer, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Mykola Swarnyk, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
EnergyButterfly, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Guillaume Speurt from Vilnius, Lithuania, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Ilya Kaminsky on Lesyk Panaisuk's Poetry Forgetfulness is unacceptable.

Lesyk Panasiuk,
versions from Ukrainian by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris

I II ІІІ ІV V

RUSSIAN ACCORDION

Lesyk Panasiuk is a Ukrainian writer, translator, designer and performance artist. Author of 3 poetry books (in Ukrainian), books in translation published in Romanian and Russian, individual works translated into 19 languages. Translator and co-translator of books by Valzhyna Mort, Siarhey Prylutski, Dmitry Kuzmin, Artem Werle and 3 anthologies of Belarusian literature. Laureate of various literary contests. Scholar of the President of Ukraine stipend for writers (2019). Resident and scholar of international residences for writers and translators in Latvia (Ventspils, 2019) and Poland (Warsaw, 2021).

Translators: Katie Farris is the author of Standing in The Forrest of Being Alive, which is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2023. Her previous collection, A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving was published by Beloit Poetry Journal as the winner of Chad Walsh Poetry Prize.

Ilya Kaminsky is the poet and translator, author of most recently Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press). He lives in Atlanta.

Featured Artwork:
Bodydock, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
EnergyButterfly, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
EnergyButterfly, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
NASA/Kjell Lindgren, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
EnergyButterfly, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
EnergyButterfly, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Михайло Пецкович, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Medoffer, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Mykola Swarnyk, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
EnergyButterfly, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Guillaume Speurt from Vilnius, Lithuania, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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Lesyk Panasiu, with introduction by Ilya Kaminsky

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Ilya Kaminsky on Lesyk Panaisuk's Poetry "Russian soldiers stayed in our building," the poet Lesyk Panaisuk wrote to me a few weeks ago. When the war began, Lesyk left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian invasion. "War will live in Bucha long after the soldiers are gone," Lesyk emails me, "because they left a lot of mines throughout Bucha."