Some time before this panel I purchased Terrance Hayes’s Lighthead—an enthralled reader and student, loosely termed, of the poet. I came to a rather spare poem in the second half of the book. Not spare like a frozen tree, and not all that different in length than five or six other poems in the collection, but having read so many pecha kuchas, multi-page poems, and pieces that used stanza and layout so acrobatically, this poem seemed strikingly naked: “Snow for Wallace Stevens.”

The poem’s speaker, undoubtedly Hayes, is moved by anger and awe to publicly wrestle the 20th century poetic giant. Hayes makes frequent reference to poems of Stevens’s in this piece, employing the ancient debate archetype of using one’s own words against him/her, the most famous of which are “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery,” “The Glass of Water,” and “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman.” And as he grapples with Steven’s racism, his steely insurance tycoon demeanor, Hayes can’t help but collapse at the skill, the devastating dexterity of Stevens’s verse. What it is to deeply admire the poet but not the man, to “have a capacity for love without / forgiveness,” Hayes writes.

Only 22 lines, one strophe, lines no longer than five metric feet, “Snow for Wallace Stevens” modestly, tactfully lays Stevens out and puts to rest, in the hands of his readers, Hayes’s confliction. He asks,

How, with pipes of winter
lining his cognition, does someone learn
to bring a sentence to its knees?

He dedicates,

This song is for my foe,
the clean-shaven, gray-suited, gray patron
of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness
blue as a body made of snow.

Baldwin says, in his essay, “the black man can scarcely dare to open a dialogue [with the white man] which must, if it is honest, become a personal confession which, fatally, contains an accusation.” Terrance Hayes’s poem embodies this. It is opening a dialogue, through his own poetic blues, that expresses his appreciation for Stevens the poet, but necessarily contains an accusation. Can the poet be flawed, bigoted, morally unsound, and still command language and something in his or her readers?

Baldwin also says, “[the white man] can scarcely dare to open a dialogue which must, if it is honest, become a personal confession—a cry for help and healing, which is really, I think, the basis of all dialogues.” In short, Baldwin asks us to take responsibility (different from simply blame) for history and what it has passed on to us. I am a white, blue-eyed man with southern roots. History has given me so much to face, for which to take responsibility. And to continue the dialogue opened by Hayes, picked up by Jake Adam York and the AWP panel (Tess Taylor, Michelle Boisseau, Martha Collins, and Kate Daniels), I have written the poem “Deep Blue,” calling back to Hayes and Stevens, my own two cents in the dialogue, some semblance of a confession, the beginning of a cry for help and healing. But the dialogue only begins with words and poems, it must be a conscientious, existential owning of history, of what it actively gives and does to us. The dialogue is about identity and taking hold of it. Hayes poses questions perfect for this:

Who is not more than his limitations?
Who is not the blood in a wine barrel
and the wine as well? I too, having lost faith
in language, have placed my faith in language.

Related Posts:

• National Poetry Month Day 32: “Some Philosophies of Orbit” by Wesley Rothman
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Faults” by Sara Teasdale
• National Poetry Month Day 25: “Letter To Be Wrapped Around a 12-Inch Disc” by Jake Adam York
• The Last Poem I Loved: “The Devil and Billy Markham” by Shel Silverstein
• The Day I Got Burned I Wanted To Be Burned

Not any old pedestrian truth, like what I ate for lunch or my age—I was capable of that sort of honesty. The truth that I told K was that I had been abused. It was something that I’d been lying to everyone about, including myself whenever possible, ever since I could remember.

We were sitting on the grass in Gurley Square eating sandwiches. As the words dripped from my mouth like so much extra mayonnaise—to my ears just as unhealthy and unattractive as said condiment—her eyes brimmed with tears. She put down her sandwich and hugged me.

I didn’t know it yet, but that was the day that I found my best friend. Becoming friends with K was like falling in love or having a baby: a profound revelation of the heart.

Over the years since, we’ve seen each other through many similar bouts of inner turmoil. We share a tendency to take abuse from others and turn it into a flaw in ourselves. Living four hours apart, we found that poems and prose took the shape of love, and as we each found lines that spoke to us about ourselves, we sent them to each other.

Last winter—the winter of the blizzard—was K’s first winter in Boston. She was lonely and hard on herself about it. As I dug for something to say to tell her that it would be ok, I happened to receive Sara Teasdale’s poem, “Faults,” in a “poem-a-day” email. I promptly copied it out and sent it to her:

They came to tell your faults to me,
They named them over one by one;
I laughed aloud when they were done,
I knew them all so well before, —
Oh, they were blind, too blind to see
Your faults had made me love you more.

It brought her peace until I visited on the Bolt Bus. Everything was okay then, because we were together. We are hard on ourselves, but easy on each other. At least that was how it always was. But one year later, K came to me with news: she was in love with my ex-boyfriend.

This particular ex was my college sweetheart. I’d dated him for four years. He’d cheated on me. We are not friends, and I’m not sure we ever will be. I was angry at my dear friend. So angry, that I didn’t know what to do. I felt ungenerous, and put-upon, and hurt. My feelings were such a jumble that my only recourse was to cut her out of my life temporarily. We didn’t speak for a month, and I hardly slept during that time. It was like hacking off a limb.

That was when K started sending me poems.

They were written by her, and they moved me and infuriated me all at once. While they were soft, I felt rigid; while they were rambling, I wanted direct; while they were vague, I needed the truth. Anger warred with intrigue, and I told her to stop sending them. If she wanted to talk, it had to be plainly.

This all culminated in a strange phone call on a rainy Saturday.

“Hey.”

“Hi.”

For the first time we had no flowery words of love for each other. She told me that she’d gone to stay with my ex, and it turned out that they didn’t love each other after all. It had been a mistake that she’d gambled our friendship on. She was terrified that she’d lost me. I felt entirely worn out and wasted. My mind told me that I should be angry, or at least hurt. Yet a calm disembodied version of my usually fiercely emotional self told her that I thought we’d be okay. And I really did. It was like popping your ears on an airplane: everything was suddenly clear.

The truth, which had been so hard for me to look at, was that she was doing what I had asked when I sent her Teasdale’s poem. She was showing me her faults, and her faults were bringing out mine, in a grand culmination of ugliness: lust and loneliness, anger and betrayal, fear and pettiness. And for all that, I loved her, and myself, more.

Related Posts:

• The Last Poem I Loved: “The Devil and Billy Markham” by Shel Silverstein
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Rick” by Jericho Brown
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Bolt from the Blue” by Gregory Orr
• Jazzy Danziger: The Last Poem I Loved, “Epithalament” by Brenda Shaughnessy
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević

I read news and posts that probably take less time to write than it does for me to make coffee, and I worry about that. I fear my sensitivities for literature have been dulled at the edge. I love tales where things blow up and the good guy woos the voluptuous gal and rights the wrong. What I fear now is that the endless bombardment of violent sound-bite images on television, drug store novels and in movies have eroded my appreciation of simple, elegant word art. I can breeze through passages of authors yet find no reason to pause, unless it’s Cormac McCarthy, whose worlds draw me in like rain to drought-parched sand. But the other day I remembered another author whose work left me in awe.

It seems there’s a new book of poems coming out by Shel Silverstein, the celebrated children’s author. It is a never-before published collection of posthumous work that didn’t make the cut. Just didn’t fit. I read this news and went looking in the garage through an old box that I hide from my two sweet daughters. I have a stack of old Playboys from the sixties and seventies (Lord, I’m getting old), just a handful, twenty or so. The old cliché about reading Playboys is “I only keep them for the articles,” but I do, really. I have the issue with shorts written by Tennessee Williams, Harlan Ellison and John D. McDonald. I have Richard Matheson’s short story “Duel” which became Stephen Spielberg’s first film. Excellent writing. One of my favorite shorts is “Scut Farcas and Murderous Mariah” by the incomparable Jean Shepherd who wrote Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and other Disasters, which greatly influenced my appreciation for comedic style.

I have Shel Silverstein’s “The Devil and Billy Markham,” a rambling poem of epic proportions that astounded me the first time I read it. I found it on the web several years ago and sent it out to all my friends with the caveat: “Piss and get something to eat before you start reading this thing. It’s long.” Written in classic Silverstein pentameter, it tells the tale of the Devil himself walking into a Nashville diner looking for someone to roll dice with him. Down-on-their-luck songwriters ignore his siren’s call, but Billy Markham steps forward. Having scribbled his tunes on napkins in a fickle town, all the while searching for someone to sing them, he sees this dice game as not just the only game in town, but the best chance he’s had in fourteen years on Music Row.

“Well, then, get down,” says the Devil, “just as if you was gonna pray,
And take these dice in your luckless hand and I’ll tell you how this game is played.
You get one roll—and you bet your soul—and if you roll thirteen you win,
And all the joys of flesh and gold are yours to touch and spend.
But if that thirteen don’t come up, then kiss your ass goodbye
And will your useless bones to God, ’cause your goddamn soul is mine!”

But, not surprisingly, the dice have no spots. Silverstein takes us on a long journey with Billy Markham, to hell, heaven and back again, all the while weaving in thoughts on God and the Devil, fate and free will, and presented in as fine an example of rhythmic pentameter that I have ever read.

I can recommend but a few authors that have shaken my soul like a good margarita. Trevanian (Shibumi), Vonnegut (Welcome to the Monkey House), and Cormac McCarthy (anything he ever wrote) to name a few, but Silverstein’s “The Devil and Billy Markham” holds a special place in my heart. Maybe it was the sacrilegious comments well-constructed in rhyme that compelled me to think about God in different ways. Or maybe it was the tale of man vs. the Devil in a test of wits that remains vibrant with me even today. All that said, if I could recommend an enjoyable read to lovers of well-crafted words, I would suggest this: “The Devil and Billy Markham.”

But with a caveat: “Piss and get something to eat before you start reading this thing. It’s long.”

Related Posts:

• The Last Poem I Loved: “Faults” by Sara Teasdale
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Rick” by Jericho Brown
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Bolt from the Blue” by Gregory Orr
• Jazzy Danziger: The Last Poem I Loved, “Epithalament” by Brenda Shaughnessy
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević

I stalked this poem, going to Agni’s online site again and again to check it out. Jericho Brown’s “Rick” is a poem of hunger, and it’s startling because for me it changed the shape of want, made it less physical and more intimate. It also made me think about a world of considerations that moved beyond the poem.

How do I, a straight black man, love a poem that is so unflinchingly homoerotic? And as I read the poem repeatedly, without shame, I realized that the poem spoke to me because it painted this picture of what we all want: a hunger that startles us, a hunger that frightens us. “This is how I learned envy” Brown begins, and it makes me think, as the poem progresses, that all love breaks down to wanting to be touched so fiercely it’s painful. Brilliant poems make you project, make you change names in the poems and find ways to insert yourself.

After the fifth or sixth time I read this poem I realized I’d done all kinds of damage to the narrative. At times Rick had been a woman named, well I won’t say her name, and at times Rick had been me, and at times Rick was Rick and I was just reading and watching and wishing that someone wanted me that bad. This is the chaos a good poem causes, this is the chaos a poem you love causes, it makes you remember again, if it is a love poem, all the reasons why you are in love, at that very moment, with a person who may have no idea what it means to have such envy.

Related Posts:

• The Last Book I Loved: “Please” by Jericho Brown
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Faults” by Sara Teasdale
• The Last Poem I Loved: “The Devil and Billy Markham” by Shel Silverstein
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Bolt from the Blue” by Gregory Orr
• Jazzy Danziger: The Last Poem I Loved, “Epithalament” by Brenda Shaughnessy

All this you see—
dance of dazzle
and debris — is aftermath.

I had no context for this fragment — no sense of poem length, title, etcetera — except that I somehow knew it came from Gregory Orr. Out of hundreds of poems and fragments of poems, why had I singled out this scrap? Perhaps it came down to that last word, “aftermath.” The sound spread out like an exhale. It broke the rhythm and sound of the fragment with such finality, the open “a” sounds in “aftermath” directly countering the earlier punches of “d,” and the tight sounds of “e” in “dance,” “dazzle” and “debris.”

The syntax of “All this you see,” focusing on the exterior before the interior (the viewer), gave me the sense of a speaker gesturing over some wide space, telling me something intimate that the uninformed eye might not catch. The speaker admits that the spectacle, the “dance,” is the result of violence. This violence has turned to beauty; the dance is beautiful because it is aftermath. And I knew that dance. I’d been inside of it for years.

When I moved from Pittsburgh to Houston last August, the scrap was lost. Then recently, browsing in the Grolier Poetry Bookstore, in Boston, I opened Gregory Orr’s “The Caged Owl” and saw the source of my beloved scrap. Its source poem was called “Bolt from the Blue,” and the stanza I’d kept was the last stanza in the last of five clipped sections. Each section was like a spell or a prayer, the short lines and intense music creating an urgent, closed space. I couldn’t let go of seeing each section as a scrap, these shreds of desire, of spiritual inquiry, written specifically to be tucked somewhere with the hope that someone who needed to would find them. These were words to be left in the hollow of a tree, as a scroll in the crack of a wall.

2. STRUCK

To die and yet
live after—

how hide
that shatter?

what mask
of bold
or blank to wear?

Sometimes (often) I struggle with what “lyric” means – I can’t shed viewing the central idea of it as music, something that is less spoken than cried out. When I read “Bolt from the Blue,” all I can think is that it achieves the highest type of lyric intensity. It sings and begs. The poems that move me always break into a type of cry. A cry, after all, is the basis of communication – one early human hollering across a canyon to another, the difference in tone signifying “Ah ha! Food!” or “Oh, shit! Giant bear!” But the way a poet cries out is not merely in sound or emotion but in syntax and form. A line of poetry is always a risk, and Orr’s short lines risk awkwardness, or the dissolution of emotional tension, but by their sound, one is pulled forward. This poem, like so many of Orr’s, is a brink poem, situated on the edge of something nearly unbearable, unspeakable.

Now that I’d read the poem in its entirety, did I feel differently about my scrap? I realized that I’d never even tried to imagine the poem that my scrap belonged to, treating the fragment like a haiku. But the questionsOrr asks throughout the poem make a difference in my understanding of “aftermath.”

First choice—
to nurse
or spurn
the hurt?

I’d forgotten that even in the midst of pain, there’s always choice. I thought again about my own aftermath; I’d been making choices all along, even in the bleakest times. Before, the scrap had only represented a kinship with Orr— a consolation that I was not the only person who felt inconsolable. Now, here was the poem in its entirety, and the poem spoke of not simply living, but surviving, changing. Perhaps the aftermath was a place to begin.

Related Posts:

• Why I Chose Gregory Orr’s River Inside the River for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Faults” by Sara Teasdale
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat 32: Gregory Orr
• National Poetry Month Day 7: “Do You?” by Sophie Klahr
• The Last Poem I Loved: “The Devil and Billy Markham” by Shel Silverstein

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers
you open always petal by petal myself as Springs opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously)her first rose

The way “Spring” is given the poem’s only capital, it is clear that spring is, in this case, the being above all other beings; the true force of nature which the writer loves so much. Nature and the lady alternate each other as the main theme; interwoven with love as their common ground they dance and take turns leading. It is almost never done subtle, though the woman is thought of as fragile (just like the flower) and the man as one lost in his words.

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

He was, at moments, lost in his words, but E.E. Cummings made experimental and avant-garde poetry attractive to the reader, and he made the entire genre attractive to me. I love his book of selected poems (edited by Richard S. Kennedy, his biographer) with its various green leaves and silhouette of a magpie on the front cover, that always feels like it has just been taken to the beach and you got the wipe the sand of. I got the book for Christmas from my dad, who is, shall I say, a fowler at rest with an unusual interest in plants and flowers. Also of some importance is the fact that he hates poetry. He cannot stand to read it, or listen to it. But at Christmas he wanted to make an exception; he wanted to know what he had given me. So I read it to him, in a somewhat unusual voice, a bit insecure, but strengthening towards the final verse. The poem ends in a way all poems should end: with a subtle conclusion, carefully hidden in a metaphor poets all around the world seem to like: nature’ s grace.

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

It is love that has its way, as does Spring, and I tried to follow that. My dad liked the poem, although he still has a hard time listening to (experimental) poetry. But he sits and waits as I recite Oscar Wilde and Jules Renard, because he knows in time I will be done and he can tell me about the morning he went cycling and under a clear blue sky he saw a blackbird and this particularly wonderful flower.

Related Posts:

• The Last Poem I Loved: “Faults” by Sara Teasdale
• The Last Poem I Loved: “The Devil and Billy Markham” by Shel Silverstein
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Nothing Twice” by Wislawa Szymborska
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Rick” by Jericho Brown
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Bolt from the Blue” by Gregory Orr

Poems rely on images, which we all know, but usually when we think of images, we think of sight or sound. Rarely does an image in a poem make you conjure smells. The thought of some things make you feel like you can smell them, like Christmas trees or barbeques, but Kasischke accomplishes engaging the nose in her title. When I think of a hardware store, the first thing I think of is the distinctive smell. A combination of paint, wood chips, and other things I can never quite place, the stores smell in a disgusting yet comforting way. LIke the ideas of the poem itself, the smell of a hardware store is one that stays with you long after you leave it.

Like most of Kasischke’s work, her words have an elegiac undercurrent to them without ever being sensational or dramatic. She begins

I found myself in a story
without suspense, only
with one deaf falcon circling deafly, and that
wild college girl next door

screaming at her mother on the phone.

A story without suspense. Any fiction writer will tell you that conflict drives everything, but here we have none. Just a deaf falcon circling deafly (though I have no idea how that is possible) and a girl screaming at her mother on the phone. It is important, I feel, for a girl to scream at her mother. NO men are needed in that scenario, yet the interactions are not flowery and loving. Women, Kasischke seems to say, are capable of a different kind of violence to one another.

Before she comes to her conclusion that a town of women would never need to lock a door, would in fact not need doors of separation at all, she makes other references to what can typically be thought of as women’s work or men’s work. She says that after turning forty, she spent her time cleaning hair from drains (another image so tactile that I can feel it, wet hair caked in soap at my shower drain) and raking leaves from gutters. Clearing blockages wherever they may be, making sure things keep moving. In a way, we can think of a door as a block, like leaves or hair, to stop the ebb and flow of daylight life. Women, in the world of the poem, are who clear the dams, and men are the ones who insist on barriers.

Oh, I recognizes my agony right away.
The howling dog of daylight life, the years of lust
had opened up
a permanent inn for phantoms in my brain.

Her poetry constantly surprises. What feels like a borderline banal stanza about lost loves or almost loves and the ache of lust becomes something entirely different with the word phantoms. Like “Me heart, a golden lobster, a star / in a grave, some / hot blood running underground” her metaphors can haunt in vague ways. I could and I have parsed these phrases until I found satisfying answers, but that satisfaction was lost the next time I read it. I don’t understand, but I don’t need to understand. I feel the heavy death implications of both sections. I feel the weight. And I love it.

The most intriguing phrase for me is “howling dog of daylight life.” I take it to mean the constant stream of pressure, the necessary things I must do between hitting snooze on the alarm clock to when night falls and the world stops wanting anything from me. But is that what it is saying? After all, don’t dogs bark at everything but only howl at the moon? And at night, when sleep comes, “the sweet / rolling water if its e’s…” is that when we are allowed to dream of a town without men, with its useless hardware store with “Whole // shelves devoted to wrenches, gleaming // and no reason to lock the door”?

Related Posts:

• The Last Poem I Loved: “Faults” by Sara Teasdale
• The Last Poem I Loved: “The Devil and Billy Markham” by Shel Silverstein
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Rick” by Jericho Brown
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Bolt from the Blue” by Gregory Orr
• The Last Poem I Loved: “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” by E. E. Cummings

I love Fredy Neptune.

This verse novel is probably the most startling reading experience I have had in some time. It is a literary achievement on a scale with Homer: imagining Homer was a contemporary Australian that is, and, if someone had told me that it had taken the author most of their life to write, I could have believed them. You may have to put all you’ve heard about Les Murray – from him or others – to the most furthest pocket of your mind to grasp this: hard, but try.

It’s worth it.

There is a marvelous ebb and flow to the often lyric verse that allows the story to really sneak up on you. It is, perhaps, not something to read in one sitting, or even two or three. You need to let it settle. Murray has managed to weld together a kind of modern Australian uber-narrative with a great yarn, a pure, poetry-breathing experience, and an uncompromising authenticity with how it depicts and engages with the modern human experience. It is both touching and brash.

It is the poet made a poem.

Related Posts:

• The Last Poem I Loved: “Faults” by Sara Teasdale
• The Last Poem I Loved: “The Devil and Billy Markham” by Shel Silverstein
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Rick” by Jericho Brown
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Bolt from the Blue” by Gregory Orr
• The Last Poem I Loved: “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” by E. E. Cummings

Language must be “weirded” if it’s going to make the ordinary new again and rejuvenate the old ideas. Someone’s bland “I’m sad and exhausted” is Shaughnessy’s “I have no winter left.” Who wouldn’t sit up in their chair, hearing that line? She does weird right. She can do it in just one word. See: the poem’s title. Shaughnessy’s melancholy twist on “epithalamium,” a lyric ode written for a bride as she prepares to wed, is a hint of the dark playfulness to come and just one example of the poet’s gift for compressing complex emotion into as few as five syllables. The title is an arrow, giving its directions sharply. It can wound you, too.

“Epithalament” appears in Shaughnessy’s 2000 debut, Interior with Sudden Joy. Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa and raised in Los Angeles. She speaks little Japanese, and once told an interviewer at Williams College that her regret about this fact led her to “pick apart English…try to beat it up a little.” This is the kind of linguistic masochism I wish for in myself, since I often fall into cozy linguistic habits, thinking the most effective way of communicating “I’m happy” in my writing is to say, “I’m happy.” Well, maybe. But maybe that phrased is exhausted, having fallen out of so many mouths. By saying it, I allow no one to enter into my happiness. I don’t mean to keep people at bay, but I do, using the expected set of words.

There’s an exercise that’s become popular in introductory poetry workshops in which the instructor provides an emotion and the students provide images that embody that emotion. “Epithalament” works as a compelling model for this exercise. Experiencing thinly veiled bitterness? Shaughnessy writes it like this: “I wish you every chapped bird on this / pilgrimage to hold your hem up from the dust.” Reading that, I’m bitter too. But I would only look on with detached sympathy had she written instead, “I’m happy for you. I swear, I am.”

I should specify that this “weirding” can’t be phony. It can’t be clever for the sake of being clever. And if the poem bends backward linguistically, it has to balance itself out elsewhere. “Epithalament”’s syntax is its foundation. It is straightforward, conversational. What’s written could be spoken; this is a plea and there’s no time for self-conscious poetic games, which create barriers. In this poem, the “weirding” lies solely in the unconventional use of language.

And the words know exactly how to crack me open. Shaughnessy writes, “I will crawl towards the heavy drawing / and design the curtains in the room of never marrying you.” Note the word “drawing,” which could indicate both the closing of curtains (the shutting off of that imagined room) and also the act of creation, as in “drawing” a portrait. By shutting herself off from this other person and the possibility of their life together, the narrator also creates something new: a different life. Not one of joy or possibility, necessarily, but a new life nonetheless. There is creation inherent in destruction. Here are “Epithalament”’s final lines:

I am sorry my clutch is all

tendon and no discipline: the heart is a severed
kind of muscle and alone.

I can hear yours in your room. I hear mine
in another room. In another’s.

Shaughnessy can make a single apostrophe a workhorse. The shift from “another” to “another’s” reminds us that these two people aren’t just separated. They are also possessed by other people. The enormity of that pain is compressed into a single punctuation mark.

I like to share this poem, and after a friend has read it just once, I, perhaps unfairly, like to start the conversation vaguely: “What do you think of this?” Most say they want to understand, but can’t yet. They say they are disoriented, blinded. They don’t know who is speaking, they don’t know who’s there. They’re locked out.

I ask, “How did you feel when you read it?” They say, “Sad.” “Lonely.” “A little broken.” They’re in the poem and they don’t know it. They can articulate the connections even as they grasp for something resembling traditional logic. I love that moment in reading, when I briefly believe that I’m lost, only to find that I’m right where I’m meant to be. That trick of perspective. When I find myself in a poem’s universe and can’t remember how I arrived there. I know that somehow, at some point, language touched me lightly on the back and glided me into the room.

Related Posts:

• “Our Andromeda” by Brenda Shaughnessy
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Faults” by Sara Teasdale
• National Poetry Month Day 2: “At the Book Shrink” by Brenda Shaughnessy
• The Last Poem I Loved: “The Devil and Billy Markham” by Shel Silverstein
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Rick” by Jericho Brown

Love can be quick and easy, especially without any social norms governing exactly how many poems you can love at one time. I’ve consistently loved “Interrogation” for the last 16 years.

It started in college. I had some money left on my bookstore grant so I decided to buy a few books of poetry. One of the books was The Misunderstanding of Nature by Sophie Cabot Black, which was published in 1994 and won the Norma Farber First Book Award that same year.

The combination of love and Heroin in “Interrogation” is so intense and true and well-written that I rarely read any of her other poems. “I lose words remembering to speak” and “my sex becomes / Suddenly agnostic” while their bodies are “becoming / Sentimental.”

I had never heard of Graywolf Press, which started their jacket copy with “Sophie Cabot Black is an unabashedly passionate poet.” In her author photo, Sophie is wearing these crazy long earrings and has some serious early 90’s hair attitude that reminds me of a cross between the movies Heathers and The Bad Seed. She knows exactly what she wants to say, and her honesty doesn’t waste words.

I’m one of those people who spends a lot of time in their head. I appreciate the moments when simple physical awareness commands attention, and my consciousness temporarily dwells in the immediate reality of the physical world. Interrogation captures this odd state with observations like “I keep thinking / You’re asking me something” until her eyes “start to empty too, become / Exactly like yours, until all there is / Is a heart, each beat rendering the last silent.”

Related Posts:

• The Last Poem I Loved: “Faults” by Sara Teasdale
• The Last Poem I Loved: “The Devil and Billy Markham” by Shel Silverstein
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Rick” by Jericho Brown
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Bolt from the Blue” by Gregory Orr
• The Last Poem I Loved: “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” by E. E. Cummings