Reprise
What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.
In the occasional series, Reprise, we republish some of the most loved essays from What Sparks Poetry’s archives.
“Explore What Sparks Poetry” is made possible with funding from The Virginia Commission for the Arts.
On October 13, at the celebration of Jim’s life and work, at the Stonington Free Library, Joanna Scott told the packed reading room that shortly after Jim started treatment for cancer he wrote to her that he hated the idea of bucket lists but he nevertheless had some everyday things he wanted to do: “Eat a little flat pizza. Get in the car. Take a shower without worrying. Enjoy the water … Have one martini … Feel on the other side of treatment. Read a book. Discover something in someone’s sentences that I haven’t before. Think out loud about what it is that I so love about sentences, about syntax, the simple beauty of grammar … Have dinner at the little bistro in Soho, just you and me …” I enthusiastically recommend James Longenbach’s posthumous book, Seafarer (published recently by W. W. Norton). In our precarious world, it is full of astonishing poems. I trust a few will last forever.
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Persona offered a path through the unimaginable. Throughout my first book, Theophanies, I wield persona to trace a foremother’s face in the dark—Sarah, Hajar, Eve, Maryam. I cannot know them, but in the absence of definitive knowledge, I can speculate. Through speculation, through the assumption of another’s voice, I can clarify my own. Using Sarah-as-foremother as a mouthpiece doesn’t reveal anything true about her. Rather, it illuminates my own inclinations, biases, and assumptions, long-obscured and buried. However frightening, however troubling. By braiding together multiple voices in a contrapuntal, I can better locate my own.
Each of us enters Johnson’s book through that singular, seemingly never settled and always unsettling noun, holding a small flat object labeled Inheritance. A thing made and possessed by another, and now — is it really yours? A thing given, but was it freely chosen?
Make him come back, she said,
her voice like something brought up intact
from the cold center of a lake.
her voice like something brought up intact
from the cold center of a lake.
In order to understand that all living beings are alike, no matter how dissimilar we may seem, we must transform our relationship with nature and assume a new stance; we must situate ourselves neither above nor below the other creatures on Earth, but beside them.
