My micro-chap Love Poem with Pomegranate is now available from Ghost City Press as a free downloadable PDF. (Donations are welcome, of course, for those who believe in tipping creators for their work!) The short collection has a number of ekphrastic poems – poems based on works of visual art – as well as others which are not ekphrastics but are perhaps poems which imagine themselves as paintings, if that makes sense.

I think they did a fantastic job with the cover, too. Don’t you? To those who read, buona lettura!

My poem “Cartography” is now available at Orange Blossom Review. The poem was written after a visit to the Museum of Natural History in Rome last summer. As often happens with poems, everything fell into it from all sides.

"Cartography"

There are maps of knowing and unknowing.

Seven thousand species of bird
locked in a glass cabinet,

brightly colored males
& unpretentious females.

Almost every living thing on Earth
has already perished.

My daughter carries a dogeared copy of Maus
in her backpack.

I have questions.

She has questions.

I have a recent translation of Antonia Pozzi’s “Giacere” up at Defunct Mag. I love this poem, and first came across it in Laurence Venuti’s edition of her poems, Breath (Wesleyan, 2001). But where Venuti’s versions slash down the page in jagged, irregular stanzas – perhaps suggesting a sense of vertigo – I have chosen a more sober arrangement, in keeping with the original.

Here in the lazy oblivion
of a backstroke
sun on my face
light breaking through eyelids
making the brain blush.
Tonight, in bed, the same posture
of exalted innocence
wide awake, drinking in
night's white eminence.

Read the poem next to the original at Defunct.

The poetry of Mario dell’Arco is happily finding fertile ground in today’s plethora of wonderful literary magazines, many of which offer precious space to words in translation. Los Angeles Review has just published three more of my translations: “Who More than Me?”, “Solo” and “Fear of Solitude.” “Solo” is one of dell’Arco’s “longer” poems, in the sense that it is more than ten lines long. The poem is about his deceased wife, and it’s a companion piece to another longish poem on the same theme, “A Marble Slab” (“Una lastra de marmo”). “Who More than Me?” offers a more whimsical view of life, rather like a Marc Chagall painting.

Who more than me?

Who more than me? Here on my back in the grass,
surrounded by poppies and snapdragons,
I’m the lord of all creation.
The sky is too limpid, though:
I fish a smoke from the pack
and blow a cloud above my head
so tomorrow it rains, and I can lie in bed.

Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco is slated for release from World Poetry Books in 2024.

My poem “Technicolor Coronation Day” is up as part of Rattle‘s ‘Poets Respond’ series. The poem is a villanelle inspired by the coronation ceremony of King Charles, a ceremony which I only viewed vicariously through Twitter and the TV news. As I wrote in my note to the poem, I find such things as kings and popes anachronistic, and have only the most superficial curiosity about those who claim divine right. In any case, it was the right occasion for a touch of lighthearted poetry, though all those hidden skeltons do make quite the clatter from behind the curtain. I read the poem on Rattlecast 194, if you’d like to hear it (if you do, please stay for the main guest, Irish poet Frank Dullaghan.)

My translation of Mario dell’Arco’s poem “Epigrams” is up at Asses of Parnassus, the journal for all things epigrammatical. The poem is untitled in dell’Arco’s version, as it is part of a sequence of translations from the Roman poet Martial.

"Epigrams"

Are my epigrams any good? Who
knows? When I asked you, dear friend,
you rummaged through them
page by page, wrinkling up
your nose, shaking your head
‘no’. Now I know: they’re good.

Below is the Romanesco original, and Martial VI, 60 for those with Latin: 

So’ brutti o belli st’epigrammi? Boooh!
Oggi l’ho chiesto a te,
amico svisciolato, e scartabbelli
tra le paggine, e aggricci er naso, e
me fai segno de no.
Ho capito: so’ belli.

(Laudat, amat, cantat nostros mea Roma libellos,
meque sinus omnes, me manus omnis habet.
Ecce rubet quidam, pallet, stupet, oscitat, odit.
Hoc uolo: nunc nobis carmina nostra placent.)

Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco will be published by World Poetry Books in 2024.

My poem “Herring Gut” has been published at Minyan Magazine, a journal dedicated to work by Jewish poets. In editor Liz Marlowe‘s words:

The magazine’s name, Minyan, refers to a group of ten adults needed for a worship service in Judaism. Each issue of Minyan will contain the work from ten writers.

The title of the poem refers to the place in Maine where we scattered our mother’s ashes, which was the type of burial she insisted on. Herring Gut is a gorgeous pocket along the Maine coast, and I’m sure it is exactly what she had in mind. If you follow the links, you can see “Herring Gut” is the third poem in a trilogy of poems on this theme. Here are the first few lines:

We held her hand until the ocean took it.
Down where the old insomniac lighthouse
delimits dawn, and Earth’s striated veins
paint igneous swaths of mineral love,
her ashes were decanted to the tides.
 

Read more at Minyan.

I’m pleased to announce that my micro-chap Love Poem with Pomegranate will be published by Ghost City Press as part of their 8th annual Summer Micro-chap Series! From their website:

Every title released as part of the Summer Series is available as a free PDF download on our website. In addition to downloading the collections of poetry, fiction, and cross-genre work, you also have the option of donating to any of the writers involved, and the best part is that they get to keep 100% of what’s donated to them. Some of our authors have even chosen to forward their donations to various charity organizations (these are noted on their individual micro-chap pages).

The title poem can be read at West Review. It was inspired by a very real pomegranate on our kitchen table.

I have two new sonnets up at the excellent new journal Pulsebeat. The first, “Devil’s Blues”, is an appreciation of Cleveland musician Peter Laughner. Peter was a central figure in the Cleveland underground scene of the 1970s, and was a founding member of both Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu. He died in 1977 from complications related to drugs and alcohol. He was 24. The poem is set on the last night of Peter’s life. He was alone in his bedroom, drinking and recording songs he loved. (So I have understood the scene to be.) The song which took the top of my head off when I first heard it is his version of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues”. I first learned of Peter from Clinton Heylin’s 1994 book From the Velvets to the Voidoids, his history of the evolution of punk music. Peter’s music was very hard to find until 1994’s Take the Guitar Player for a Ride double album (Tim/Kerr). In 2019, Smog Veil unveiled a long-awaited box set of Peter’s recordings, finally giving him his due. I have been listening to Peter’s music since I was in college; this sonnet is my small contribution to his legend.

The other poem, “Mirror Mirror”, is a mirror sonnet. As Borges wrote in his story “Tlön, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius”, there is something monstrous about mirrors. I’ll leave it at that.

Thanks to editor David Stephenson at Pulsebeat for publishing these!

Rome, of course.