"When I wrote this poem, I had been reading about different forms of dance notation and thinking about them in terms of poetics. Dance notations—as translations of movements into symbols and paths—are an incredibly strange, elaborate, and illegible (to me) language. Maybe in part because I am a translator, I’m fascinated by such attempts to create a 'shorthand' for things that one’s language can’t quite accommodate. Are poems a sort of notation? This poem tries to 'put into words' certain intuitions, fears, and impressions that elude the rational and experiential. There is a weird image of violin-playing, for example, which seems to stretch a bit beyond what is sensory or sensible. Years after writing this poem, I also read it very much as a meditation on, and in, the music of poems. The music of the words is a lot richer than the semantics in this space." Michelle Gil-Montero on "Notation" |
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"The Preposterous Beauty of Gerard Manley Hopkins" Kay Ryan delves into Hopkins' poem, "Spring and Fall." "The fact that the mind can move around in a poem—is asked to do this—is why poetry is considered the supreme art. Poetry is the shape and size of the mind. It works the way the mind works. It is deeply compatible with whatever it is we are. We dissolve in it; it dissolves in us." viaLIT HUB |
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| In this multifaceted book-length poem and love letter to basketball legend Julius Erving (Dr. J), Ross Gay connects Dr. J’s famous move from the 1980 NBA Finals to pick-up basketball and the Middle Passage, to photography and state violence, to music and histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how imagination might bring us closer to each other. |
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