Museum Poetica

By the light of Psalm 151, we ask, what poet, writing now, is so ready for catastrophe as Rachel Blau DuPlessis? What living poet can so masterfully take up the Lurianic myth of the Breaking of the Vessels, do justice to its imaginative drama, fathom its complexities with an acute historical and critical awareness, yet sing this tale in a way that is both true to our secular moment, and true to the spiritual agonies at the heart of any such shattering as the tale tells.

Maybe now finally ink begins to flow into the nib of this Platignum calligraphy fountain pen I have not used probably since 1985. Yes maybe now finally. Maybe now. Maybe finally.

Deliver what? Deliver truth? Deliver us? For a poet engaged in composing “the secular word,” there is something disturbingly messianic about Heller’s vision.

As the partisan of energy as a form of imagination, Will Alexander relentlessly critiques linear conceptions of cause and effect, along with all mechanistic modalities of thought and practice.

Fagan’s poems ask us what kind of attention we pay to the world and if that attention pays off, whether or not the world pays us back with a measure of truth.

However outlandish the utterance, however devious the digression, or pained the disclosure, an Olson poem conveys and keeps a somber promise, that words will not fail. 

These poems happen in the depths revealed when the minima of existence, non-existence, desire, and emptiness are viewed with unwavering intensity, without the distraction of pre-given narratives or ready-made emotions.

“He is our Cavafy, completely unknown. Out of time. All of these things are exceptionally old — the sketch, and the tavern, and the darkening afternoon.”

…..like a roadside someone threw
brasura into, a ditch used up stuff ends down in,

Beautiful and mysterious in the extreme, Chernicoff’s poems are messages from the borderline offered as testimony to the thrilling precariousness of our spiritual adventure.