Category: landscape

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Your speech evokes a thousand sympathies,
And all my being’s silent harmonies
Wake trembling into music.

Dreams, Amy Lowell

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Newcleus, Jam On it. 1984.

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The ??launiu breeze lifts voices from the night.
Dogs curl under their houses. The city
burns to the shore, red with distant industry.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons. 

Even the dogs curl into sleep. Even the city.
We watch the headlights swipe past our window.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons
or their eclipse—night opening to night. 

Headlights skirt across our window
trailing the scent of gas. Sometime past 2am, 
I feel eclipsed. Night reaches out to night
drawing me back to the hospital room,

the scent of my baby’s matted hair. Past 2am,
I held his tiny body and we floated in a silence
that whirred and pinged. In the dark hospital,
in my exhaustion, I heard singing emerge. 

I held his tiny body, floating through a silence 
not silent, but a greeting from this other land, 
this one long night where we’d emerged.
He opened his eyes and his gaze was steady—

a greeting, a land. I began to weep. His body
against mine was too small for the weight 
of his gaze, his steady eyes—a doorway 
between our nights, and through it, voices.

Sleepless Pantoum, Laurel Nakanishi

January 2025 Poem-a-Day Guest Editor Campbell McGrath

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… it had been set in motion some time ago by what have by now become the familiar complaints that citizens of democracies make about all their leaders, particularly left-leaning ones, however moderate: that they represent an out-of-touch élite, that they are unresponsive to the economic necessities of ordinary people, that they are too sympathetic to outsiders at the cost of the native population, and all the rest.

Adam Gopnik on Trudeau’s resignation.

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Days of rain. The drey outside my window would keel
and the wind would plunder. My heart was valent
with possibility: I could be anyone now, half woman,
half asterism. Fragmental as a new year. Patron saint
of the rutilant and cindering. I could rove incognito
to places pinned in office calendars. Too long I’d
mothered myself with the admiration of onlookers.
I was grateful to be alone in my abstraction. To be both
ignored and abraded by a coarse sky. I did not offer up
parts of me like kindling. I will not embellish a single
hemisphere. The ground bulges with a wet sound.
It is glutted with what was given. I do the wolfish work
of god and make myself again. Ripen like lichen on
the pavement. Like rain carrying the memory of lightning.

My Hair Burned Like Berenice, Ruth Awad

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Tara Anne Dalbow explores artist-poet Mina Loy’s thrilling embrace of contradiction. (LARB)

In her unfinished epic “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (1923–25), Loy describes two occasions that alleviated the painful drudgery of her life. The first was a visit from her Hungarian grandmother, dressed in fine silk and lace, who lavished praise and affection upon her. Loy likens their embrace to a “spiritual orgasm, the mystic’s admittance to cosmic radiance.” The second memory recalls an escape from her parent’s rage into their garden, where she encountered the wonders of her consciousness as it appeared intimately interconnected with the surrounding world. Beneath the “high-skies,” she saw how the “steadfast light” shone not upon her but from within her—a moment of “indissoluble bliss” that “illuminated” her connection to all things and the generative possibilities of creative invention.

Taken together, these two experiences composed her initiation into the spiritual realm “beyond the synopsis of vision,” where she bore witness to the divine force beneath the material surface: the continual metamorphosis that sustains the world. Loy had discovered her salvation and her sui generis talent: distilling the transformative energies of the invisible—sensual, spiritual, mystical—into poems, paintings, and objets d’art. Yes, the invisible could be contained—invisibly—in the visible. From then on, artistic expression became primarily an alchemical act: like gold from lead, she would wrest beauty, love, and light from the wretchedness of life. At first, from nothing but the turning of her mind, young Loy imagined stories and poetry; later, scraps of paper became tessellated bouquets (her Jaded Blossoms series) and cellophane and salvaged glass turned into calla lilies suspended miraculously in a lucent globe at the base of a lamp.

[…]

Loy adopted complexity as a liberatory practice, refusing to conform to social expectations or strip down her expansive notion of the self. She fought against what she perceived as a compulsive tendency to “re-simplify” in an attempt to “forget what a complicated affair life has been mistaken for.” Perhaps there is value in following her lead and making a more concerted effort to resist the reduction of our lives to easy categorization and quick consumption. Could insisting on a little more complexity restore some degree of agency or integrity? As Loy suggests in her 1917 poem “Human Cylinders,” a solution can “Destroy the Universe,” especially if that solution is homogeneity.

Loy’s understanding of paradox and her tolerance for uncertainty were qualities she brought to bear in every aspect of her life. Rather than upholding or evading binaries, Loy nullified them, ratifying the validity of both sides. And yet, she took stands, asserted her beliefs, refused the paralysis of inaction. She often went too far. She often went so far that no one else could see what she saw. Always alert to nuance and multiplicity, she reached a point where complementarity existed beyond duality, establishing a continuum of ideals, identities, affiliations, and faiths. She lived on a spectrum, ever moving toward what André Gide described as the “limitless possibilities of acceptance.”

Tara Anne Dalbow

“In a 1924 tribute, she calls Gertrude Stein the ??“Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary” who can “extract / a radium of the word.””

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