Building Community
In our occasional series, Building Community, we spotlight connections between our work on the page and our work in the community. In each issue, we pair a poem and writing prompt from our featured poet with an interview that explores what poetry brings to our neighborhoods, cities, and the wider world — and what community makes possible for poetry itself.
“Explore What Sparks Poetry” is made possible with funding from The Virginia Commission for the Arts.
That pattern of intensities and how they meet associative networks is I think a lot of what gives a poem liveliness or not. This is why it’s not paraphrasable—because whatever that thing is is what I think the poem actually is, and that isn’t something you can summarize and transmit in another form. It has to be experienced in that form, because that’s what it is. Different forms facilitate different kinds of experience, though not in a one-to-one way.
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There has been an important pattern in my poetry books: to set, and also often, to break the constraints. To realize my early 21st Century realities don’t allow for Sapphic stanzas, or that the rigour of late 20th Century women who were experimental writers had a different relation to time, though they too played with the constraints they set.
Subjunctives lead to a looking back just as they lead to a looking forwards. They are Janus, the Grecian two-faced god of past and future. They are January on your calendar. New year / old year.
I wanted this poem to also evoke the feeling of wonder still beating at the heart of being alive now, the glimmers of hope still shining here.
Zheng Xiaoqiong rarely writes happy poems. For Zheng, and for me, the function of poetry, its innate raison d’être, is to mourn. And in mourning, to point a finger. Look! the poet cries, Look! Look at everything that’s been lost, that we are in the process of losing, that we are throwing away out of ignorance and fear and laziness and greed, the habits we’ve formed over a lifetime and cannot loosen our grasp on even if it kills us.
Time turns various and nervy – a click marking a photographic moment, a slow burn of interior pain. Photographs interrupt time, invite you into its astonishment. They propose other dimensions, reminding us that even our thoughts enter the past as they travel through the mind.
My standard response to fear is to learn everything I can about its source. This explains my historical obsession with vampires, terrorism, volcanoes, nuclear war, Wrathful Deities, magical words and objects designed to repel demons.
The book that unspools behind “Temporal Saturation” is a series of inter-genre pieces, which I call poem-essays. Each is an interrogation of knots of words, mysteries, symbols that repeat throughout my life. Some of them are also explorations of other observed temporal phenomena but they all follow threads of faith and translation and linguistics. I aimed to fill my sails with the conviction of inevitable understanding and power the work with the humming engine of the scientific method.
An epigraph is a kind of capture that is also a kind of release. Lines from someone’s poem leave a mark on you, and you set out to respond to them. Or you discover lines that chime uncannily with something you’ve written, and juxtapose the two. Is this trespass or tribute? It may seem that two or three lines is a small and respectful borrowing. And yet implicitly you take possession through the connections you establish between another person’s words and your own. The lines you borrow are a metonym for the poem in which they occur, indeed for the poet you are implicitly claiming kinship with. Something not yours takes hold of you, but it also releases new potential in something you think of as yours. Thereby your work is enlarged; so thereby are you.
Born of a spark from the fire that gave rise to the Hebrew, this translation into English seeks—breath by breath and phoneme by phoneme—to extend that chain of transmission, that sense of linkage and rippling responsibility. How to make the stacked abstraction at the start of the poem come alive in the face of the actual lives lost, ruined, displaced, deferred, and denied? How to bring the envisioned alternatives into the realm of the capillary and palpable? How to account for the grotesque asymmetries involved—the catastrophic destruction on the one hand and, on the other, the microcosmic thinking and feeling that true resolution would entail?
“All sex is a body trying / to tell a story with a hand / over its mouth,” James Allen Hall writes in “Erotic Crime Thriller.” That is the crux of the poem for me, and points to all the questions it poses. Like, what does sex mean, between any two bodies? When it’s illicit? What does sex mean when your body, or the body of the person you’re with, could be the site of, a spreader of disease? What does a body mean when all the sex it has is considered illicit; when its very desire is seen as a disease? And what does a movie mean when it tells us the story of a time just before a tragedy? In watching it after the fact, is it possible to just appreciate the film for what it is, or will we inevitably look for signs of what’s to come? Will we inevitably wish we could go back in time to the world of the film and change it somehow, and therefore save the real world, the one we live in, from what hadn’t yet happened? The body of this poem comes to you, smelling of sweat and leather, and it may have a hand over its mouth but it still asks these questions, tells these stories, and demands the reader listen.
After reading “Metropolitan” by Patty Nash, there was new life in the scratch papers, refrigerator to-dos, lost notes — all scribbles had gained significance! The poem showed me that a convenient numbered list can hold everything, including unlimited sinks. All of the lists I make to fend off anxiety and discombobulation can be more than their utility. As a writer, this taught me that a mundane form should not be overlooked, and to shift my perspective to discover and create poetry in my routine writing. Rendering a day at the museum in this way with vivid imagery made me want to go wander through one myself, with a notebook at the ready.
One Poetry Daily that struck a resonant chord was May 31, 2024’s "Sad Rollercoaster" by Jared Harél. The poem chronicles the summer in which his daughter came to understand Death. In second grade, I wrote a dirge contemplating the black void of nothingness. This prompted a meeting with my teacher, parents, and principal. I explained the poem as an attempt to wrap my head around the notion of Death, rather than as a call for help. The second-grade mind is hard to decipher, and the bleak existential tone didn’t help. Now, as both a parent and an educator, I appreciate the additional check into authorial intent. Teaching high school kids sometimes elicits flights of fancy that raise eyebrows and might be a similar cause for concern. Yet the poet in me understands the need to explore thought into poetry with no regrets too. Harél’s poem awakened these vivid memories and relevant thoughts.
A selection of reader responses to poems from our archive
A collection of our readers' responses to their favorite poems from our archive.
In “Forgiveness,” Pinsky’s fluid, associative moves form an electron cloud of image, shadow, and fact around a heavy nucleus of a solitary voice wrestling with its own thoughts, ambitions, and ethical questions. The poem steers from Emmanuel Levinas’s lecture “‘The forgiving / Of an unforgivable crime’” to Pound’s poetics (and Pinsky’s revelation about duration and stress) in a whorl of motion, a record of a dynamic thought process animated, in part, by music.
