Editorial: 1 September 2011

August 12, 2011 Heather McHugh, a poet as well as a prize-winning translator, writes poems that demand to be read aloud: she is a master of exuberant linguistic play and association, alliteration, internal and end-of-line rhyme, and rolling rhythms, evinced in poems such as ‘Half Border, Half Lab’:

So cave canem, even stars have litters—little
lookers, cacklers, killers . . . Morning raises up
the hackled men. (What’s
milk, among our ilk, but
opportunity for spillers?)

C.K. Williams was a guest poet at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam in 2010, and a number of his poems were published on PIW at that time. For this issue, the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, our US partners, have published ten further poems by C.K. Williams, all of which first appeared in Poetry magazine between 1971 and 2011. These poems demonstrate Williams’ range, and his skill at portraying external observation alongside internal enquiry: the narrative ‘On the Metro’ is an account by turns earnest, by turns self-deprecating, of the physical connections we make and imagine making with others around us, and ‘The Gaffe’ recounts a childhood memory that still makes the narrator “blush with guilt”, while ‘Zebra’, the focal point of which is “a key-chain zebra” also investigates guilt, of the individual and collective kind, in a subtly controlled mix of lament, irony and political invective.

Linda Gregerson’s work is notable for its formal experimentation. The poems published here adopt various different forms, one of which is a lithe tercet form Gregerson developed and worked in for several decades. The gorgeous four-part ‘Bleedthrough’ is written in this form, and takes as a departure point the work of artist Helen Frankenthaler:

And from room to room in the crowded

museum she blazons her facility. That’s night. That’s
                           not. That’s
          Sunset Corner, says the plaque. As though

the vaults of fire had found their
                           boundary
          in an act of wit, or California’s amplitude

in glib suburban pavement. Or have I
                           missed
          the point again? Out-

flanking the painter’s luxuriant brushwork
                           (maybe
          I’ve loved this grief too well) is

something more quotidian and harder
                           won.

Of the middle line of the tercet, a short, indented “pivot line”, Gregerson says, “It gave me a kind of skeletal resistance, something that syntax could work against, and thus it became a true generative proposition, not just a kind of packaging. The lineation produced the poem.” The lack of left-justified blocks of text in much of her work also creates a wonderful airiness, allowing the poem to move dynamically down and across the page and to breathe into the rhythms created by the line breaks. This lace-like, open form seems to generate space for self-reflexive questions, asides, interruptions and associative trains of thought. Gregerson leads the reader on a rich path through these mental meanderings, and punctuates the journey with images that imprint themselves on the mind: Russian mathematicians scrawling symbols on a bus stop wall, the rim that remains after a blood stain has been rinsed away, a possum walking on a thin crust of snow.

We hope you enjoy the wonderful work of this issue. Since our last publication, we have also added to our Vimeo channel more videos recorded at the Poetry International Festival over the past few years. These subtitled poetry readings are perfect for viewing on mobile devices. Do take a look.