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1. Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

This week, in our prose series, we present "At Home in Exile," by Scott Beauchamp, a review from Dublin Review of Books of Miłosz: A Biography, by Andrzej Franaszek (edited and translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker):

"Miłosz notoriously bore witness to the most cataclysmic events of twentieth century Europe. It isn’t simply that his first-hand experience of these calamities – the Russian Revolution, Great War, Polish-Russian war and Second World War – is more overt in his writing than the work of many other poets and essayists, although that’s true. It’s also the case that Miłosz re-envisioned these monstrous events on a more human scale with the honest immediacy of his own experience and rich moral imagination. And so the relationship between his biography and his art is subtly profound, each affirming the other in a wild reciprocity."

Look for it here.

Enjoy this week's poems!

Warmest regards,

Don Selby & Diane Boller

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2. Sponsor Messages

 Vermont College of Fine Arts MFAs in Writing
Vermont College of Fine Arts offers a traditional low-residency MFA in Writing program—now celebrating its 35th year—along with a residential MFA in Writing & Publishing program.

 Palm Beach Poetry Festival
January 15-20, 2018, Delray Beach, Florida 
Deadline to apply for workshops: November 10
Workshops, readings, interview, gala and performance events with Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Chard deNiord, Beth Ann Fennelly, Ross Gay, Rodney Jones, Phillis Levin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Tim Seibles. Admission is by application. For more information, visit www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org or email [email protected]

 Diode Editions Book & Chapbook Contests
Diode Editions Book & Chapbook Contests Now Open. At Diode Editions our mission is to beautifully craft our books, and to fanatically support our authors.

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3. Poetry News Links

News and reviews from around the web, updated daily:

• Jeremy Noel-Tod on The Letters of T.S. Eliot VII: 1934-1935, edited by John Haffenden and Valerie Eliot. . (The Irish Independent)
• Sarah V. Schweig reviews Orexia, by Lisa Russ Spaar. (Fanzine)
• Night Sky with Exit Wounds, by Ocean Vuong, reviewed by Sandeep Parmar. (The Guardian)
• Kat Chow talks with Bao Phi about Thousand Star Hotel. (NPR)
• Kaveh Akbar interviews Oliver Baez Bendorf. (Divedapper)
• Terrance Hayes introduces a poem by Mary Jo Bang. (The New York Times)
• And more...

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4. New Arrivals

These new arrivals are available for purchase via Poetry Daily/Amazon.com.

• Where Now: New and Selected Poems, Laura Kasischke (Copper Canyon Press)
• Dots & Dashes, Jehanne Dubrow (Southern Illinois University Press)
• Tumbling Toward the End, David Budbill (Copper Canyon Press)
• Early Hour, Michael McGriff (Copper Canyon Press)
• The Lice, W. S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press)
• So What If It's True: From the Notebooks of Lorri Jackson, RW Spryszak (Thrice Publishing NFP)
• Salt Moons: Poems 1981-2016, Lex Runciman (Salmon Poetry)

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5. This Week’s Featured Poets

The work of the following poets will appear as Today's Poem on the days indicated:

Monday - Dean Rader
Tuesday - Ange Mlinko
Wednesday - Grace Schulman
Thursday - Alessandra Lynch
Friday - Philip Fried
Saturday - Grace Bauer
Sunday - Peter Cole

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6. Featured Poets July 17, 2017 - July 23, 2017

These and other past featured poets may be found in our archive:

Monday - Seif Eldeine
Tuesday - Shamala Gallagher
Wednesday - Leila Chatti
Thursday - Thomas McCarthy
Friday - Robert Cording
Saturday - C. Wade Bentley
Sunday - Sidney Wade

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7. Last Year’s Featured Poets

These poems will be retired from our archive during the coming week.

Thomas McCarthy, "The Unexpected"
Marilyn Hacker, "Calligraphies"
C. D. Wright, "Obscurity and Legacy"
Timothy McBride, "Road Metal"
D. A. Powell, "Otherhood"
Alice Notley, "We Thought We Were Our Own"
Kate Angus, "Complicity"

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8. Poem From Last Year

We Thought We Were Our Own

We thought we were our own people for tens of thousands 
of years. We thought there were others like us but who 
identified with a different story: a truly other people; 
but we are all the people aren't we, we the people? We 
have forgotten how to be we the people, someone says. 
Have we? says another. We, if we're the right we, are 
the people. We can be we everyone, in the right thought.

We found our own true love when we were young, but we 
didn't know why we had to do this. Hadn't we 
always? And now, we don't know. Everything we 
have done we can come to despise: dividing us into 
the we of men and the we of women for example; and all 
the other we the peoples we, the largest we, are composed of. 
Can we truly be this most large we of all, all the people? 
We are domestic and malicious, we are kind and empty, 
we are purely stupid, sadistic, mortal, but if that, as 
we replace us with ever more of us, we will never die. 
I might like to die someday, someone says. I'm not sure 
that I don't mind if we die. For I'm not sure what 
living is, in that way that we always seem to be sure. 
We who ever manipulate what we think, we kids.

We loved our mother and our father, for they watched us play 
without interruption, across the long afternoon and into evening. 
Then we lost each other to our new families, our most 
desired we, we thought; why do we want now to find each 
other again, the we of our beginning? Who do we trust the most, 
as we cleave and uncleave and cleave again into successive 
groups, small and large, in a time we define as us, our 
history? Our time is only us. Time the substantial we, 
epochal and great, as only we can see it, our particulars. 
In the historical library, one reads our book. Don't 
you want to know what's real? Don't you want to worship our 
pitiless exclusion of the times we don't know, can't remember?

We found our shores walking across a shallow ocean 
or rowing in boats. Or we just materialized alongside 
the people we are most like who aren't people—maybe 
they're people. Maybe the apes are people. And the birds, 
lizards, and lilies, we say; fish and algae, the sweet other 
mammals, the dear ones, the spiders and frogs. We the people, 
who appeared before we were born, for some of us were always 
there. We found us from before, but there was a long, raucous 
before; and some of us are sad we can't remember it. We 
have stories to complete, as in our long integrity, though 
they aren't true. We aren't true, defining ourselves as 
mammals with digits and brains attesting to our superiority 
over other parts of our we, but there is no superiority 
without our we, without all of us. Without us we are nothing. 
Without delicate, exhalant flora we are nothing; without 
mists, and stars and planets, and the creatures who live in our 
bodies. We are all of us congealed into our definition of we.

We go where we live—there is nowhere else. We make 
ourselves hats and gendered pants and skirts. We are sure 
we are correct in our details; we are of our times, our 
class, and our values, correct as only we know how; 
and our machines excite us, so much that we consider 
them us: we want them to think and act as us. We 
are our body of the airplane, the computer, and the car. 
We are our canon and our rebellion, but that is more 
of the story we have invented that is urgent, appropriate, 
and true. We are our songs and films. We are what some of us 
say, that more of us choose. How could we love each other 
without knowing how from our resemblant forms, our 
echoing sounds? We can identify ourselves from our pastimes. 
And our loves. For aren't we our loves, above all? We 
hate the ones who are spontaneously different, as if 
what they loved accused us of unhappiness. We divide 
then; we don't know which of us are really our ethic or element.

We are changeable in our moods for we are what is. We watch 
with our eyes of us the squirrel person streak across the road, 
and with our hands of us we write words in a notebook 
of our language. These marks as on an airplane wing blazing 
are words for us to read, though some part of us can't read; 
some part of us is unlettered and describes us by living. 
Some part of us has no leader, no police, and no protocol. 
We in that part are above us, are the us to which we'll return. We 
knowing the clear-edged poem of the object we see as us, 
we who act. We could never sit at this kitchen table 
without our terrible and beautiful past and our poems that tell us 
who we are. We know ourselves inside the extinguishable 
light, but we know ourselves in another universe: we 
are here by our agency, which we cannot remember. A 
world like a boat passing by, and perhaps another on the dark 
water. How could we stop being us, even when we leave 
the jeweled cinema? We are gravely and lightfully blessed, 
but we bless ourselves. We are our way, but we fight 
within it and about it. We step on the fragile thread of our way, 
going about with no other explanation but givenness: this 
is our gift, but who or what can have given it to us except for us?

 

Alice Notley
Certain Magical Acts
Penguin Books

Copyright © 2016 by Alice Notley
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission