My poem “Summer Snow” is now up at Gyroscope Review. It’s about our local snowball stand in suburban Maryland, which was a major part of my childhood and a significant Maryland cultural signpost.

The poem was inspired by Tara A. Elliott’s “Snowball” which brought back a lot of memories of that time and place. Poetry is great for that, like a little time machine constructed out of language. You can go anywhere in a poem.

I’ve had two recent poems published in the past couple of weeks. The first, “Self-Portrait as a Salt Shaker Shaped Like a Hasidic Rabbi”, appears in Whale Road Review; the second, “Skylight”, appears in One Art. Many thanks to editors Katie Manning (WRR) and Mark Danowsky (OA) for giving them a home.

I’ve fallen behind with updates! In addition to my essay “The Paradox of Self-Promotion”, I had a new poem published last week at Autumn Sky called “Travelers Dark-Eyed with Love”. It’s a cento, a form entirely composed by lines from other poets’ work. It’s actually really enjoyable to write a cento, although it proposes its own sort of challenge.

“Travelers Dark-Eyed with Love”

Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me
from whose unseen presence the leaves
firm, fixed forever in your closing eyes
abjure all wealth and treasure. In the tempestuous
petticoat, your funeral. And on the day,
in farewell on the terrace, I caught sight
of myself as shadows blur towards the heart of night.
I am the least difficult of men. All I want:
not even to choose any more, only to follow.
Never mind the gossip of the world,
the scrimmage of appetite everywhere.
Memory, committed to the page, had broke
deceived into believing in permanence
for soundlessly the never-believed-in neared.

(With lines from Diane Seuss, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Randall Jarrell, Carolyn Kizer, Robert Herrick, Wang Wei, Norman MacCaig, Wendy Cope, Frank O’Hara, Constantine Cavafy, Ho Xuan Huong, Delmore Schwartz, Hart Crane, Moira Egan & Rainer Maria Rilke – more or less in that order.)

Thanks to editor Christine Klocek-Lim for choosing my poem!

I have a new essay up at Mark Danowsky’s newsletter, OMM, about the paradox of self-promotion among small press authors. In it I make the claim that publishers should help writers shoulder the burden of promoting their books instead of outsourcing it to them entirely. Here is a teaser.

There is only so much time in a person’s life, and we are forced to make decisions as to how and what we spend it on. Given the choice between writing and revising new work and promoting my books on the Internet (those people grow tiresome quickly), I will always choose the former. There will never be an upside to shilling one’s book on Instagram for a pittance in royalties, and every time I’ve made a half-hearted attempt at it I’ve felt the bite of shame. Even if I were to sell twenty copies in a calendar year, it would amount to around $40—hardly worth the time investment on my part, or the corrosive effect on one’s pysche of spending all that time on social media.

-from “The Paradox of Self-Promotion”

If you want to read more, please check out the original article on OMM!

My poem “Hey, Joe” is now available at Chestnut Review.

I kill the engine, frazzled by “Hey, Joe,”
how Hendrix jimmied up this old folk tune
which still gets air time on the radio.

The poem actually happened as described – I pulled the car over and began jotting down the first lines on my phone as the song was still playing. I had long been intrigued by the song’s obscure origins, which are ably dealt with in this podcast episode of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. Before Hendrix recorded it in 1966, it had already been done memorably by the Byrds, Love, the Leaves and other L.A. bands of the mid-1960s. As far as I can tell, the ‘original‘ version was by Billy Roberts (no, not Leadbelly.)

I know so many songs like this
which rope you in to their worlds on the sly

then leave you panting with a little kiss
of blood. 

Art is complicated, and I’m not at all sure it should always make us comfortable. “Hey, Joe” is ear candy, but at its center is a dark tale of violence and misogyny (Joe gets away with murdering his woman for the ‘crime’ of running around with another man.) It seemed a worthy subject for a poem.

Here is an incredible live performance by the Jimi Hendrix Experience from 1967.

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.)