An understanding of Graham’s body of work begins with the Modernists. A deep understanding requires knowledge of the work of major twentieth century philosophers . . . . This article is intended to provide readers with a basic, accessible understanding of the context in which Jorie Graham writes. It describes her major influences, focusing on...
“Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks…” This brief description of two kinds of clocks from Dylan Thomas’ play for voices, Under Milk Wood, is part of a longer passage in which one of the voices describes a room filled with a great variety of clocks. Whether or...
You see, ultimately translating is all about searching for some kind of kinship between two languages, a way to uncover that linguistic essence of the text itself. Piotr Florczyk, welcome to The California Journal of Poetics! Even though you translated Anna Swir’s poems because you felt a connection to her poetry, is there significance...
“I unroll into a grub. A grub with the mind of a girl, a girl with the lips of an insect” Even metamorphosis is transformed in Katherine Larson’s first book, Radial Symmetry, which was chosen by Louise Glück for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The lines above come from a dream poem titled...
So much of the book is about being comfortable with paradox, especially the paradoxes that surround us every day but we prefer not to consider—for instance, what is the experience of a person who is both girl and boy? What is the experience of unexpectedly falling in love with someone of the same gender? ...
![Gerard Manley Hopkins: [As Kingfishers...]](http://www.californiapoetics.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/FormalGenius-290x290.jpg "Gerard Manley Hopkins: [As Kingfishers...]")
“Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name” Lines like these, from Hopkins’ 1918 poem “[As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame],” demonstrate the poet’s remarkable ability to use form (in this case, the rhythm of the English language) in tandem with...
The translator is a silent deconstructor, a night guard of the bridges of difference and understanding. Nikola Madzirov (poet, essayist, translator) was born into a family of Balkan Wars refugees in 1973 in Strumica, Macedonia.
John Burgess’ second book of poems, A History of Guns in the Family, is an ambitious attempt to contain the experiences of an entire lifetime in a compact work of nine poetic sequences.
In his famous “Meridian” speech Celan confessed that poetry is ultimately “an eternalization of nothing but mortality, and in vain.” The contradictions between silence and speech, between human consciousness and death are present in his poem “Chanson of a Lady in the Shade.” One of Celan’s earlier poems, “Chanson of a Lady in the...
Noose and Hook itself is a tearing and mending of identity and verse. Both are the noose and the hook, suffocating readers and at the same time grabbing and snagging their attention. Lynn Emanuel is a poet who challenges the lyrical “I” to a word match. Philosophical inquiries, particularly the poet’s struggle with language’s deficiencies,...
The world of contemporary poetry is a little richer, and a little wiser, now that Paloff’s work is a part of it. Benjamin Paloff’s first collection of poetry, The Politics, drinks from the same well famously tapped by the High Moderns, including T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. Specifically, Paloff holds to...
I’m interested in how the body reacts to the rug constantly being pulled out from under it. Welcome, Gaby, to The California Journal of Poetics. Thank you for taking time out of your grueling schedule to share the world of your poetry with us. You have a remarkable way of tapping into the lives...
