Poetry all around

I'm in my home state this week visiting family. I haven't written a lick of poetry since I stepped off the plane (I wrote a few lines in the airport). Even though I'm not writing during these days of rest and rejuvenation, poems have been cropping up all around me. I met a friend for lunch and she shared two separate poems as a response to George Ella Lyon's "Where I'm From." One had been written by her daughter for a High School English class, the other by my friend, who wanted to try the exercise. I was tickled when she showed them to me. If anyone thinks poetry is dead, it's alive and well in my small town.

And it's alive and well in my parents' house. A few days ago, my father showed me two poems he's working on. I was amazed by his ability (they were damn good poems), stunned that I hadn't known about his interest in poetry until this very week, and proud.

I'll be ready to get back to work when I return home. This is turning out to be a very inspiring trip to the homeland.

Right now

I have a poem in the current issue of UCity Review. You can read it here.

I'd like to share the journey of this poem with you.

But first, I want to let all the new and would-be poets in on a little secret: not all of the poems you are writing right now are going to be published this year.

One of the poems you're working on right now will take you years to finish. In five more years, when you've left your dead-end job and are finally working at your dream job, you'll still be working on that poem. And you'll tell your students or fellow writers that you have a poem that's still in the revision stage.

One or two of the poems you write this year will be ready to send to journals right away. Others won't be ready until a few months after the initial inspiration.

And then there will be a poem that you won't drastically revise, but that you'll tinker with on and off for years, knowing it's not right, and then when it feels right, you'll send it out, and an editor will want it. And you'll say to yourself when you see it in print, "I remember where I was when I wrote that poem. That was a long time ago." And it will feel right to see in print after all those years.

Vera Pavlova

I won't deny my love for Russian writers. It started with Dostoevsky in graduate school, even though the donkey beating scene in Crime and Punishment scared the bejesus out of me and made me put the book away for a few months before I was brave enough to finish it. I spent the Christmas break of my second year of grad school drowning myself in more Dostoevsky and also Tolstoy.

The previous year, I read Akmatova for the first time and was blown away. There's a difference between Russian novels and poetry for me: the former is highly philosophical and descriptive to the point where I feel I've been living with the characters my entire life, and the latter is so simple to the point of stripping away the images and associations that make up most of American poetry.

In the January 2010 issue of Poetry, I ran across poems by a Russian poet, Vera Pavlova, who has just been published in English for the first time. I fell in love with her poems immediately, and there was no doubt in my mind I would buy her book straightaway. I received it within the last week and find it refreshing to read her poems. It is so unlike the poems I normally read in journals. I applaud Poetry for continuing to publish poets in translation, for I cannot always find the time to seek out these poets on my own.

Here's a sampling of her work, from If There Is Something To Desire: 100 Poems.

11

Let us touch each other
while we still have hands,
palms, forearms, elbows...
Let us love each other for misery,
let us torture each other,
mangle, maim,
to remember better,
to part with less pain.

(translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour)